The amalgamation of science and technology: An essay about the factors and events that lead to the development of science from the Greek period to the Scientific Revolution

Essay by acid_logixUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, November 2002

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Science has changed significantly since its beginnings. Some of these changes have been due to differences in our requirements others have been the result of dissatisfaction with old theories. Modern science did not happen in a single day - it took time to make an impact on people's thinking and on institutions, with added difficulties because, when experimental science started, most facts were still uncertain. The key characteristics of modern science only become clear when modern science is compared with Western Science in earlier periods.

The ancient Greek alphabet was a marvelous piece of mechanism, the result of thousands of years of intellectual effort. It distinguished itself from the alphabetical system adopted by other cultures by having a minimal set of alphabets making possible for the first time education of the masses upon which all later progress of civilization was so largely to depend upon. Writing thus led to the beginnings of science & philosophy.

The beginnings of scientific explanations appeared in ancient Greece approximately 2500 years ago. Early mythology included a vast array of beliefs on such subjects as origin of the Earth, causes of Earth's geologic activities, origins of life, nature of the stars and other heavenly bodies, and so on. These were the same subjects addressed by the Greek philosopher-scientists. It was not what they explained, but how they explained them that made the Greeks so unique. Lloyd stated this as follows: "Their achievement was rather to have rejected supernatural explanations of natural phenomena and to have instituted the practice of rational criticism and debate in that context."1 The Greeks handed down to us the belief in an inherently rational world, the necessary precondition for doing science. With this breakthrough came a new task: to discover and describe the patterns governing nature's behavior. This can be also...