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+title: "Christianity and science"
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+Most scientific and technical innovations prior to the Scientific Revolution were achieved by societies organized by religious traditions. Ancient Christian scholars pioneered individual elements of the scientific method. Historically, Christianity has been and still is a patron of sciences. It has been prolific in the foundation of schools, universities and hospitals, and many Christian clergy have been active in the sciences and have made significant contributions to the development of science.
+Historians of science such as Pierre Duhem credit medieval Catholic mathematicians and philosophers such as John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon as the founders of modern science. Duhem concluded that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud to proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools". Many of the most distinguished classical scholars in the Byzantine Empire held high office in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Protestantism has had an important influence on science, according to the Merton Thesis, there was a positive correlation between the rise of English Puritanism and German Pietism on the one hand, and early experimental science on the other.
+Christian scholars and scientists have made noted contributions to science and technology fields, as well as medicine, both historically and in modern times. Some scholars state that Christianity contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution. Between 1901 and 2001, about 56.5% of Nobel Prize laureates in scientific fields were Christians, and 26% were of Jewish descent (including Jewish atheists).
+Events in Christian Europe, such as the Galileo affair, that were associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment led some writers such as John William Draper to postulate a conflict thesis, holding that religion and science have been in conflict throughout history. While the conflict thesis remains popular in atheistic and antireligious circles, it has lost favor among most contemporary historians of science. Most contemporary historians of science believe the Galileo affair is an exception in the overall relationship between science and Christianity and have also corrected numerous false interpretations of this event.
+
+== Overview ==
+
+Most sources of knowledge available to the early Christians were connected to pagan worldviews as the early Christians largely lived among pagans. There were various opinions on how Christianity should regard pagan learning, which included its ideas about nature. For instance, among early Christian teachers, from Tertullian (c. 160–220) held a generally negative opinion of Greek philosophy, while Origen (c. 185–254) regarded it much more favourably and required his students to read nearly every work available to them.
+Earlier attempts at reconciliation of Christianity with Newtonian mechanics appear quite different from later attempts at reconciliation with the newer scientific ideas of evolution or relativity. Many early interpretations of evolution polarized themselves around a struggle for existence. These ideas were significantly countered by later findings of universal patterns of biological cooperation. According to John Habgood, all man really knows here is that the universe seems to be a mix of good and evil, beauty and pain, and that suffering may somehow be part of the process of creation. Habgood holds that Christians should not be surprised that suffering may be used creatively by God, given their faith in the symbol of the Cross.  Robert John Russell has examined consonance and dissonance between modern physics, evolutionary biology, and Christian theology.

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+
+Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas held that scriptures can have multiple interpretations on certain areas where the matters were far beyond their reach, therefore one should leave room for future findings to shed light on the meanings. Augustine argued:Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars ... Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.The "Handmaiden" tradition, which saw secular studies of the universe as a very important and helpful part of arriving at a better understanding of scripture, was adopted throughout Christian history from early on. Also, the sense that God created the world as a self-operating system is what motivated many Christians throughout the Middle Ages to investigate nature.
+The Byzantine Empire was one of the peaks in Christian history and Christian civilization, and Constantinople remained the leading city of the Christian world in size, wealth, and culture. There was a renewed interest in classical Greek philosophy, as well as an increase in literary output in vernacular Greek. The Byzantine science played an important role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and to Renaissance Italy, and also in the transmission of Islamic science to Renaissance Italy. Many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high office in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
+Modern historians of science such as J.L. Heilbron, Alistair Cameron Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein, and Ted Davis have reviewed the popular notion that medieval Christianity was a negative influence in the development of civilization and science. In their views, not only did the monks save and cultivate the remnants of ancient civilization during the barbarian invasions, but the medieval church promoted learnings and science through its sponsorship of many universities which, under its leadership, grew rapidly in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church's "model theologian", not only argued that reason is in harmony with faith, he even recognized that reason can contribute to understanding revelation, and so encouraged intellectual development. He was not unlike other medieval theologians who sought out reason in the effort to defend his faith. Some of today's scholars, such as Stanley Jaki, have claimed that Christianity with its particular worldview, was a crucial factor for the emergence of modern science. According to professor Noah J. Efron, virtually all modern scholars and historians agree that Christianity moved many early-modern intellectuals to study nature systematically.

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+
+=== Works cited ===
+Numbers, Ronald L. (2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02339-0.
+Shalev, Baruch A. (2003). 100 Years of Nobel Prizes. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. ISBN 978-81-269-0278-1.
+Thomas, Anne (24 April 2000), This I Know Experimentally, Spring 2000 Monday Night Lecture Series: Science and Religion, Pendle Hill (published 6 October 2003), archived from the original on 1 May 2006, retrieved 29 June 2009
+
+== Further reading ==
+Buxhoeveden, Daniel; Woloschak, Gayle, eds. (2011). Science and the Eastern Orthodox Church (1. ed.). Farnham: Ashgate. ISBN 9781409481614.
+Spierer, Eugen. God-of-the-Gaps Arguments in Light of Luther's Theology of the Cross. Archived 19 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine
+Matthews, Roy T.; Platt, F. DeWitt (1991). The Western Humanities. Mayfield Publishing Co. ISBN 0874847850.
+
+== External links ==
+Christianity And The Scientist by Ian G. Barbour Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
+Cambridge Christians in Science (CiS) group Archived 3 July 2019 at the Wayback Machine
+Christians in Science website
+Ian Ramsey Centre, Oxford
+The Society of Ordained Scientists-Mostly Church of England
+"Science in Christian Perspective" The (ASA)
+Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation (CSCA)
+The International Society for Science & Religion's founding members.(Of various faiths including Christianity)
+Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences
+Secular Humanism.org article on Science and Religion Archived 19 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine

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+Physics teacher David Hutchings and intellectual historian James C. Ungureanu credit the central tenets of traditional Christianity for having been the greatest benefit to scientific thinking, while at the same time noting the irony of the conflict thesis:And yet, as impossible as it might seem, both Conflict and Warfare are plagued by an even greater irony than that. It turns out that when they went  after Christian doctrine for being the ultimate enemy of science, they were  engaging in friendly fire. For, in actual fact, no other body of thought has ever been of greater benefit to scientific thinking than the central tenets of traditional Christianity have—in the whole of human history.David C. Lindberg states that the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages was a time of ignorance and superstition due to the Christian church is a "caricature". According to Lindberg, while there are some portions of the classical tradition which suggest this view, these were exceptional cases. It was common to tolerate and encourage critical thinking about the nature of the world. The relation between Christianity and science is complex and cannot be simplified to either harmony or conflict, according to Lindberg. Lindberg reports that "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led. There was no warfare between science and the church." Ted Peters in Encyclopedia of Religion writes that although there is some truth in the "Galileo's condemnation" story but through exaggerations, it has now become "a modern myth perpetuated by those wishing to see warfare between science and religion who were allegedly persecuted by an atavistic and dogma-bound ecclesiastical authority". In 1992, the Catholic Church's seeming vindication of Galileo attracted much comment in the media:
+Generations of historians and sociologists have discovered many ways in which Christians, Christian beliefs, and Christian institutions played crucial roles in fashioning the tenets, methods, and institutions of what in time became modern science. They found that some forms of Christianity provided the motivation to study nature systematically.
+A degree of concord between science and religion can be seen in religious belief and empirical science. The belief that God created the world and therefore humans, can lead to the view that he arranged for humans to know the world. This is underwritten by the doctrine of imago dei. In the words of Thomas Aquinas, "Since human beings are said to be in the image of God in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect, such a nature is most in the image of God in virtue of being most able to imitate God".
+During the Enlightenment, a period "characterized by dramatic revolutions in science" and the rise of Protestant challenges to the authority of the Catholic Church via individual liberty, the authority of Christian scriptures became strongly challenged. As science advanced, acceptance of a literal version of the Bible became "increasingly untenable" and some in that period presented ways of interpreting scripture according to its spirit on its authority and truth.
+Regarding the subject on the distribution of Nobel Prizes by religion between 1901 and 2000, the data taken from Baruch A. Shalev, shows that between the years 1901 and 2000 reveals that 654 Laureates belong to 28 different religion. 65.4% have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.
+
+== History ==
+
+=== Roots of the Scientific Revolution ===
+
+Between 1150 and 1200, Christian scholars had traveled to Sicily and Spain to retrieve the writings of Aristotle, which had been lost to the West after the Fall of the Roman Empire. This produced a period of cultural ferment that one "modern historian has called the twelfth century renaissance". Thomas Aquinas responded by writing his monumental summas in support of human reason as compatible with faith. Christian theology adapted to Aristotle's secular and humanistic natural philosophy. By the Late Middle Ages, Aquinas's rationalism was being heatedly debated in the new universities. William Ockham resolved the conflict by arguing that faith and reason should be pursued separately so that each could achieve its own end. Historians of science David C. Lindberg, Ronald Numbers and Edward Grant have described what followed as a "medieval scientific revival". Science historian Noah Efron has written that Christianity provided the early "tenets, methods, and institutions of what in time became modern science".
+Modern western universities have their origins directly in the Medieval Church. They began as cathedral schools, and all students were considered clerics. This was a benefit as it placed the students under ecclesiastical jurisdiction and thus imparted certain legal immunities and protections. The cathedral schools eventually became partially detached from the cathedrals and formed their own institutions, the earliest being the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Oxford (1096), and the University of Paris (c. 1150).
+Some scholars have noted a direct tie between "particular aspects of traditional Christianity" and the rise of science. Other scholars and historians have credited Christianity with laying the foundation for the Scientific Revolution. According to Robert K. Merton, the values of English Puritanism and German Pietism led to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. (The Merton Thesis is both widely accepted and disputed.) Merton explained that the connection between religious affiliation and interest in science was the result of a significant synergy between the ascetic Protestant values and those of modern science.

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+=== Influence of biblical worldviews on early modern science ===
+At first, according to Andrew Dickson White's 1896 book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, a biblical worldview affected negatively the progress of science through time. Dickinson also argues that immediately following the Reformation matters were even worse. The interpretations of Scripture by Luther and Calvin became as sacred to their followers as the Scripture itself. For instance, when Georg Calixtus ventured, in interpreting the Psalms, to question the accepted belief that "the waters above the heavens" were contained in a vast receptacle upheld by a solid vault, he was bitterly denounced as heretical. Today, much of the scholarship in which the conflict thesis was originally based is considered to be inaccurate. For instance, the claim that early Christians rejected scientific findings by the Greco-Romans is false, since the "handmaiden" view of secular studies was seen to shed light on theology.  This view was widely adapted throughout the early medieval period and afterwards by theologians (such as Augustine) and ultimately resulted in fostering interest in knowledge about nature through time.  Also, the claim that people of the Middle Ages widely believed that the Earth was flat was first propagated in the same period that originated the conflict thesis and is still very common in popular culture. Modern scholars regard this claim as mistaken, as the contemporary historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers write: "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference." From the fall of Rome to the time of Columbus, all major scholars and many vernacular writers interested in the physical shape of the Earth held a spherical view with the exception of Lactantius and Cosmas.
+
+H. Floris Cohen argued for a biblical Protestant, but not excluding Catholicism, influence on the early development of modern science. He presented Dutch historian R. Hooykaas' argument that a biblical world-view holds all the necessary antidotes for the hubris of Greek rationalism: a respect for manual labour, leading to more experimentation and empiricism, and a supreme God that left nature and open to emulation and manipulation. It supports the idea early modern science rose due to a combination of Greek and biblical thought.
+Oxford historian Peter Harrison is another who has argued that a Biblical worldview was significant for the development of modern science. Harrison contends that Protestant approaches to the book of scripture had significant, if largely unintended, consequences for the interpretation of the book of nature.  Harrison has also suggested that literal readings of the Genesis narratives of the Creation and Fall motivated and legitimated scientific activity in seventeenth-century England.  For many of its seventeenth-century practitioners, science was imagined to be a means of restoring a human dominion over nature that had been lost as a consequence of the Fall.
+Historian and professor of religion Eugene M. Klaaren holds that "a belief in divine creation" was central to an emergence of science in seventeenth-century England. The philosopher Michael Foster has published analytical philosophy connecting Christian doctrines of creation with empiricism. Historian William B. Ashworth has argued against the historical notion of distinctive mind-sets and the idea of Catholic and Protestant sciences. Historians James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob have argued for a linkage between seventeenth-century Anglican intellectual transformations and influential English scientists (e.g., Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton). John Dillenberger and Christopher B. Kaiser have written theological surveys, which also cover additional interactions occurring in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Philosopher of Religion, Richard Jones, has written a philosophical critique of the "dependency thesis" which assumes that modern science emerged from Christian sources and doctrines. Though he acknowledges that modern science emerged in a religious framework, that Christianity greatly elevated the importance of science by sanctioning and religiously legitimizing it in medieval period, and that Christianity created a favorable social context for it to grow;  he argues that direct Christian beliefs or doctrines were not primary source of scientific pursuits by natural philosophers, nor was Christianity, in and of itself, exclusively or directly necessary in developing or practicing modern science.
+Oxford University historian and theologian John Hedley Brooke wrote that "when natural philosophers referred to laws of nature, they were not glibly choosing that metaphor. Laws were the result of legislation by an intelligent deity. Thus, the philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) insisted that he was discovering the "laws that God has put into nature." Later Newton would declare that the regulation of the Solar System presupposed the "counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." Historian Ronald L. Numbers stated that this thesis "received a boost" from mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925). Numbers has also argued, "Despite the manifest shortcomings of the claim that Christianity gave birth to science—most glaringly, it ignores or minimizes the contributions of ancient Greeks and medieval Muslims—it too, refuses to succumb to the death it deserves." The sociologist Rodney Stark of Baylor University, argued in contrast that "Christian theology was essential for the rise of science."
+
+=== Reconciliation in Britain in the early 20th century ===
+In Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-twentieth-century Britain, historian of biology Peter J. Bowler argues that in contrast to the conflicts between science and religion in the U.S. in the 1920s (most famously the Scopes Trial), during this period Great Britain experienced a concerted effort at reconciliation, championed by intellectually conservative scientists, supported by liberal theologians but opposed by younger scientists and secularists and conservative Christians. These attempts at reconciliation fell apart in the 1930s due to increased social tensions, moves towards neo-orthodox theology and the acceptance of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
+In the twentieth century, several ecumenical organizations promoting a harmony between science and Christianity were founded, most notably the American Scientific Affiliation, The Biologos Foundation, Christians in Science, The Society of Ordained Scientists, and The Veritas Forum.
+
+== Branches of Christianity ==

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+
+=== Catholicism ===
+
+While refined and clarified over the centuries, the Catholic position on the relationship between science and religion is one of harmony and has maintained the teaching of natural law as set forth by Thomas Aquinas.  For example, regarding scientific study such as that of evolution, the church's unofficial position is an example of theistic evolution, stating that faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins. Catholic schools have included all manners of scientific study in their curriculum for many centuries. Historian John Heilbron says that "The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, then any other, and probably all, other Institutions."
+The first universities in Europe were established by Catholic Church monks. The first Western European institutions generally considered to be universities were established in present-day Italy (including the Kingdom of Sicily, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Kingdom of Italy), the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of France, Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Spain, the Kingdom of Portugal and the Kingdom of Scotland between the 11th and 15th centuries for the study of the arts and the higher disciplines of theology, law, and medicine. These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the exact date when they became true universities, though the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide:
+
+Today almost all historians agree that Christianity (Catholicism as well Protestantism) moved many early-modem intellectuals to study nature systematically. Historians have also found that notions borrowed from Christian belief found their ways into scientific discourse, with glorious results.
+Galileo once stated "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." In 1981,  John Paul II, then pope of the Catholic Church, spoke of the relationship this way: "The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of Man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer". The influence of the Church on Western letters and learning has been formidable. The ancient texts of the Bible have deeply influenced Western art, literature and culture. For centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, small monastic communities were practically the only outposts of literacy in Western Europe. In time, the cathedral schools developed into Europe's earliest universities and the church has established thousands of primary, secondary and tertiary institutions throughout the world in the centuries since. The Church and clergymen have also sought at different times to censor texts and scholars. Thus, different schools of opinion exist as to the role and influence of the Church in relation to western letters and learning.
+One view, first propounded by Enlightenment philosophers, asserts that the Church's doctrines are entirely superstitious and have hindered the progress of civilization. Communist states have made similar arguments in their education in order to inculcate a negative view of Catholicism (and religion in general) in their citizens. The most famous incidents cited by such critics are narratives of the Church in relation to Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler.
+In opposition to this view, some historians of science, including non-Catholics such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein, and Ted Davis, have argued that the Church had a significant, positive influence on the development of Western civilization. They hold that, not only did monks save and cultivate the remnants of ancient civilization during the barbarian invasions, but that the Church promoted learning and science through its sponsorship of many universities which, under its leadership, grew rapidly in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. St.Thomas Aquinas, the Church's "model theologian," argued that reason is in harmony with faith, and that reason can contribute to a deeper understanding of revelation, and so encouraged intellectual development. The Church's priest-scientists, many of whom were Jesuits, have been among the leading lights in astronomy, genetics, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics, becoming some of the "fathers" of these sciences. Examples include important churchmen such as the Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (pioneer in the study of genetics), Roger Bacon (a Franciscan friar who was one of the early advocates of the scientific method), and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (the first to propose the Big Bang theory; see Religious interpretations of the Big Bang theory). Other notable priest scientists have included Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Nicholas Steno, Francesco Grimaldi, Giambattista Riccioli, Roger Boscovich, and Athanasius Kircher. Even more numerous are Catholic laity involved in science: Henri Becquerel who discovered radioactivity; Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Marconi, pioneers in electricity and telecommunications; Lavoisier, "father of modern chemistry"; Vesalius, founder of modern human anatomy; and Cauchy, one of the mathematicians who laid the rigorous foundations of calculus.
+Throughout history many Catholic clerics have made significant contributions to science. These cleric-scientists include Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Bernard Bolzano, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham, and others. The Catholic Church has also produced many lay scientists and mathematicians.
+
+==== Cistercian in science ====

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+The Catholic Cistercian order used its own numbering system, which could express numbers from 0 to 9999 in a single sign. According to one modern Cistercian, "enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit" have always been a part of the order's identity, and the Cistercians "were catalysts for development of a market economy" in twelfth-century Europe. Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the technological advances in Europe were made in the monasteries. According to the medievalist Jean Gimpel, their high level of industrial technology facilitated the diffusion of new techniques: "Every monastery had a model factory, often as large as the church and only several feet away, and waterpower drove the machinery of the various industries located on its floor." Waterpower was used for crushing wheat, sieving flour, fulling cloth and tanning – a "level of technological achievement [that] could have been observed in practically all" of the Cistercian monasteries.
+The English science historian James Burke examines the impact of Cistercian waterpower, derived from Roman watermill technology such as that of Barbegal aqueduct and mill near Arles in the fourth of his ten-part Connections TV series, called "Faith in Numbers".  The Cistercians made major contributions to culture and technology in medieval Europe: Cistercian architecture is considered one of the most beautiful styles of medieval architecture; and the Cistercians were the main force of technological diffusion in fields such as agriculture and hydraulic engineering.
+
+==== Jesuits in science ====
+
+Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the teaching of science in Jesuit schools, as laid down in the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu ("The Official Plan of studies for the Society of Jesus") of 1599, was almost entirely based on the works of Aristotle.
+The Jesuits, nevertheless, have made numerous significant contributions to the development of science. For example, the Jesuits have dedicated significant study to earthquakes, and seismology has been described as "the Jesuit science". The Jesuits have been described as "the single most important contributor to experimental physics in the seventeenth century". According to Jonathan Wright in his book God's Soldiers, by the eighteenth century the Jesuits had "contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."
+The Jesuit China missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced Western science and astronomy, then undergoing its own revolution, to China. One modern historian writes that in late Ming courts, the Jesuits were "regarded as impressive especially for their knowledge of astronomy, calendar-making, mathematics, hydraulics, and geography". The Society of Jesus introduced, according to Thomas Woods, "a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible". Another expert quoted by Woods said the Scientific Revolution brought by the Jesuits coincided with a time when science was at a very low level in China.
+The missionary efforts and other work of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, between the 16th and 17th century played a significant role in continuing the transmission of knowledge, science, and culture between China and the West, and influenced Christian culture in Chinese society today.
+
+=== Protestant influence ===
+
+Protestantism has promoted economic growth and entrepreneurship, especially in the period after the Scientific and the Industrial Revolution. Scholars have identified a positive correlation between the rise of Protestantism and human capital formation, work ethic, economic development, and the development of the state system.
+Protestantism had an important influence on science, according to the Merton thesis there was a  positive correlation between the rise of Puritanism and Protestant Pietism on the one hand and early experimental science on the other. The Merton thesis has two separate parts: Firstly, it presents a theory that science changes due to an accumulation of observations and improvement in experimental techniques and methodology; secondly, it puts forward the argument that the popularity of science in seventeenth-century England and the religious demography of the Royal Society (English scientists of that time were predominantly Puritans or other Protestants) can be explained by a correlation between Protestantism and the scientific values. In his theory, Robert K. Merton focused on English Puritanism and German Pietism as having been responsible for the development of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Merton explained that the connection between religious affiliation and interest in science was the result of a significant synergy between the ascetic Protestant values and those of modern science. Protestant values encouraged scientific research by allowing science to study God's influence on the world and thus providing a religious justification for scientific research.
+According of Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States by Harriet Zuckerman, a review of American Nobel Prize winners awarded between 1901 and 1972, 72% of American Nobel Prize laureates, have identified from Protestant background. Overall, Americans of Protestant background have won a total of 84.2% of all awarded Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 60% in Medicine, 58.6% in Physics, between 1901 and 1972.
+Some of the first colleges and universities in America, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, Duke, Boston, Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Amherst, all were founded by mainline Protestant denominations.
+
+==== Quakers in science ====

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+---
+
+The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, encouraged some values which may have been conducive to encouraging scientific talents.  A theory suggested by David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed indicated early Quakers in the US preferred "practical study" to the more traditional studies of Greek or Latin popular with the elite. Another theory suggests their avoidance of dogma or clergy gave them a greater flexibility in response to science.
+Despite those arguments a major factor is agreed to be that the Quakers were initially discouraged or forbidden to go to the major law or humanities schools in Britain due to the Test Act. They also at times faced similar discriminations in the United States, as many of the colonial universities had a Puritan or Anglican orientation. This led them to attend "Godless" institutions or forced them to rely on hands-on scientific experimentation rather than academia.
+Because of these issues it has been stated Quakers are better represented in science than most religions. There are sources, Pendlehill (Thomas 2000) and Encyclopædia Britannica, that indicate that for over two centuries they were overrepresented in the Royal Society. Mention is made of this possibility in studies referenced in religiosity and intellince and in a book by Arthur Raistrick. Whether this is still accurate, there have been several noteworthy members of this denomination in science. The following names a few.
+
+=== Eastern Christian influence ===
+
+Christian scientists and scholars (particularly Nestorian and Jacobite Christians) contributed to the Arab Islamic Civilization during the Ummayad and the Abbasid periods by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic. Over a century and a half, primarily Middle Eastern Oriental Syriac Christian scholars in House of Wisdom translated all scientific and philosophic Greek texts into Arabic language in the House of Wisdom. They also excelled in philosophy, science (Masawaiyh, Eutychius of Alexandria, and Jabril ibn Bukhtishu) and theology (such as Tatian, Bardaisan, Babai the Great, Nestorius, and Thomas of Marga) and the personal physicians of the Abbasid Caliphs were often Christians, such as the long-serving Bukhtishu dynasty. Many scholars of the House of Wisdom were of Assyrian Christian background.
+Among the Copts in Egypt, every monastery and probably every church once had its own library of manuscripts.
+In the fifth century AD, nine Christian Syrian Monks translated Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac works into the Ethiopian language of Ge'ez and organized Christian monastic orders and schools, some of which are still in existence today. By the sixth century AD, Assyrian Christians had begun exporting back to the Byzantine Empire their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. the literary output of the Assyrians was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language. In the field of medicine, the Assyrian Bukhtishu family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur in Iran. When Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur became ill and no physician in Baghdad could cure him, he sent for the dean of the medical school in Gundeshapur, which was renowned as the best of its time The Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum). One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of one of the oldest universities in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based. The first Mongolian writing system (which was first set down by assyiran monks) used the Assyrian Aramaic and Syriac alphabets, with the name "Tora Bora" being an Assyrian phrase meaning "arid mountain." The hierarchical structure of Buddhism is modeled after the Church of the East. The Assyrian Christian Stephanos translated the work of Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides into the Arabic language, and for over a century, this translated medical text was used by the Muslim states.

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+---
+title: "Christianity and science"
+chunk: 8/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_science"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:43.006189+00:00"
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+---
+
+In the field of Optics, Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology called the Ten Treatises on the Eye, which was written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject in the western world until the 1800s.
+It was a Christian scholar and Bishop from Nisibis named Severus Sebokht who was the first to describe and incorporate Indian mathematical symbols in the mid 7th century, which were then adopted into Islamic culture and are now known as the Arabic numerals.
+During the fourth through the seventh centuries, scholarly work in the Syriac and Greek languages was either newly initiated, or carried on from the Hellenistic period. Centers of learning and of transmission of classical wisdom included colleges such as the School of Nisibis, and later the School of Edessa, and the renowned hospital and medical academy of Jundishapur; libraries included the Library of Alexandria and the Imperial Library of Constantinople; other centers of translation and learning functioned at Merv, Salonika, Nishapur and Ctesiphon, situated just south of what later became Baghdad. The House of Wisdom was a library, translation institute, and academy established in Abbasid-era Baghdad, Iraq. Nestorians played a prominent role in the formation of Arab culture, with the Jundishapur school being prominent in the late Sassanid, Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. The distinguished historian of science George Sarton called Jundishapur "the greatest intellectual center of the time." Notably, eight generations of the Nestorian Bukhtishu family served as private doctors to caliphs and sultans between the eighth and eleventh centuries.
+The common and persistent myth claiming that Islamic scholars "saved" the classical work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European Dark Age between the fifth and tenth centuries. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never "lost" to be somehow "recovered" and "transmitted" by Islamic scholars, as many keep claiming: the texts were always there, preserved and studied by the scholars and monks of the Byzantines and passed on to the rest of Europe and to the Islamic world at various times. Aristotle had been translated in France at the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel before translations of Aristotle into Arabic (via the Syriac of the Christian scholars from the conquered lands of the Byzantine Empire). Michael Harris points out:
+
+The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece ... were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.... Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.
+Historian John Julius Norwich adds that “much of what we know about antiquity—especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law—would have been lost forever if it weren't for the scholars and scribes of Constantinople.”
+
+The Byzantine science played an important role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and to Renaissance Italy, and also in the transmission of Islamic science to Renaissance Italy. Many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high office in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The migration waves of Byzantine scholars and émigrés in the period following the Crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204 and the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, is considered by many scholars key to the revival of Greek and Roman studies that led to the development of the Renaissance humanism and science. These émigrés brought to Western Europe the relatively well-preserved remnants and accumulated knowledge of their own (Greek) civilization, which had mostly not survived the Early Middle Ages in the West. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "Many modern scholars also agree that the exodus of Greeks to Italy as a result of this event marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance". The Byzantines pioneered the concept of the hospital as an institution offering medical care and the possibility of a cure for the patients, as a reflection of the ideals of Christian charity, rather than merely a place to die.
+Paper, which the Muslims received from China in the eighth century, was being used in the Byzantine Empire by the ninth century. There were very large private libraries, and monasteries possessed huge libraries with hundreds of books that were lent to people in each monastery's region. Thus were preserved the works of classical antiquity.
+When Saint Cyril was sent by the Byzantine emperor in an embassy to the Arabs in the ninth century, he astonished his Muslim hosts with his knowledge of philosophy and science as well as theology. Historian Maria Mavroudi recounts:
+
+When asked how it was possible for him to know all that he did, he [Cyril] drew an analogy between the Muslim reaction to his erudition and the pride of someone who kept sea water in a wine skin and boasted of possessing a rare liquid. He finally encountered someone from a region by the sea, who explained that only a madman would brag about the contents of the wine skin, since people from his own homeland possessed an endless abundance of sea water. The Muslims are like the man with the wine skin and the [Greeks] like the man from the sea because, according to the saint's concluding remark in his response, all learning emanated from the [Greeks].

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+---
+title: "Christianity and science"
+chunk: 9/11
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_science"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:43.006189+00:00"
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+---
+
+== Perspectives on evolution ==
+In recent history, the theory of evolution has been at the centre of controversy between Christianity and science, largely in America. Christians who accept a literal interpretation of the biblical account of creation find incompatibility between Darwinian evolution and their interpretation of the Christian faith. Creation science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and attempts to disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the geological history of Earth, formation of the Solar System, Big Bang cosmology, the chemical origins of life and evolution. It began in the 1960s as a fundamentalist Christian effort in the United States to prove Biblical inerrancy and falsify the scientific evidence for evolution. It has since developed a sizable religious following in the United States, with creation science ministries branching worldwide. In 1925, The State of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in all schools in the state. Later that year, a similar law was passed in Mississippi, and likewise, Arkansas in 1927. In 1968, these "anti-monkey" laws were struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States as unconstitutional, "because they established a religious doctrine violating both the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution."
+Most scientists have rejected creation science for several reasons, including that its claims do not refer to natural causes and cannot be tested. In 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled that creationism is religion, not science, and cannot be advocated in public school classrooms.
+Theistic evolution is a discipline that accepts the current scientific understanding of the age of the Earth and the theory of evolution. It includes a range of beliefs, including views described as evolutionary creationism, which accepts contemporary science, but also upholds classical religious understandings of God and creation in Christian context. This position has been endorsed by the Catholic Church. Proponents of theistic evolution include Founder of BioLogos, Francis Collins, Prominent conservative Christian Theologian, Tim Keller, and prominent Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. The philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig denies being an adherent of theistic evolution, but he also does not rule it out. He declares himself "agnostic" on the subject. In his book In Quest of the Historical Adam, he defends an approach to Genesis that is compatible with evolution.
+
+== Modern reception ==
+
+=== Individual scientists' views ===
+
+Christian Scholars and Scientists have made noted contributions to science and technology fields, as well as medicine, both historically and in modern times. Many well-known historical figures who influenced Western science considered themselves Christian such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Emanuel Swedenborg, Alessandro Volta, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Antoine Lavoisier, André-Marie Ampère, John Dalton, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, J. J. Thomson, John Polkinghorne and Juan Maldacena 
+Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the Sun, and credited God with the design. In the concluding General Scholium to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Other famous founders of science who adhered to Christian beliefs include Galileo, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and others.
+Throughout history many Catholic clerics have made significant contributions to science. These cleric-scientists include Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Bernard Bolzano, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham, and others. The Catholic Church has also produced many lay scientists and mathematicians.
+Prominent modern scientists advocating Christian belief include Nobel Prize–winning physicists Charles Townes (United Church of Christ member) and William Daniel Phillips (United Methodist Church member), evangelical Christian and past head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins, and climatologist John T. Houghton.
+
+=== Scientific Revolution ===
+
+In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead argued that modern science inherited a "faith" in the power of human reason from medieval scholastics. Other scholars have noted a direct tie between "particular aspects of traditional Christianity" and the rise of science. For example, historian Peter Harrison argues that Christianity contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution because many of its key figures had deeply held religious convictions and believed "themselves to be champions of a science that was more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas about the natural world that they replaced." In The Origins of Modern Science, Herbert Butterfield observes that "the Christians helped the cause of modern rationalism by their jealous determination to sweep out of the world all miracles and magic except their own." Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all sincerely believed that the order and perfection of the universe were reflections of the perfection of its Creator. Far from perceiving their work as irreligious, they saw uncovering the hidden perfection of the universe using mathematics as an act of devout worship.
+
+=== Nobel Prize ===

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+title: "Christianity and science"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:43.006189+00:00"
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+---
+
+According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of Nobel Prizes Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference (427 prizes). Overall, Christians are considered a total of 72.5% in Chemistry between 1901 and 2000, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics. Between 1901 and 2000 it was revealed that among 654 Laureates 31.9% have identified as Protestant in its various forms (208 prize), 20.3% were Christians (no information about their denominations; 133 prize), 11.6% have identified as Catholic and 1.6% have identified as Eastern Orthodox. Although Christians make up over 33.2% of the world's population, they have won a total of 65.4% of all Nobel prizes between 1901 and 2000.
+In an estimate by scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, between 1901 and 2001, about 57.1% of Nobel Prize winners were either Christians or with a Christian background. Between 1901 and 2001, about 56.5% of laureates in scientific fields were Christians. According to scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Protestants were overrepresented in scientific categories and Catholics were well-represented in the Literature and Peace categories.
+In an estimate made by Weijia Zhang from Arizona State University and Robert G. Fuller from University of Nebraska–Lincoln, between 1901 and 1990, 60% of Physics Nobel prize winners had Christian backgrounds.
+According of Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States by Harriet Zuckerman, a review of American Nobel prizes winners awarded between 1901 and 1972, 72% of American Nobel Prize Laureates, have identified from Protestant background. Overall, Americans of Protestant background have won a total of 84.2% of all awarded Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, 60% in Medicine, 58.6% in Physics, between 1901 and 1972.
+
+=== Criticism ===
+Events in Christian Europe, such as the Galileo affair, that were associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment led scholars such as John William Draper to postulate a conflict thesis, holding that religion and science have been in conflict methodologically, factually and politically throughout history. This thesis is held by several scientists like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. While the conflict thesis remains popular in atheistic and antireligious circles, it has lost favor among most contemporary historians of science, and the majority of scientists in elite universities in the U.S. do not hold a conflict view.
+More recently, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., asserts that, despite the widely held conception of the Catholic Church as being anti-science, this conventional wisdom has been the subject of "drastic revision" by historians of science over the last 50 years. Woods asserts that the mainstream view now is that the "Church [has] played a positive role in the development of science ... even if this new consensus has not yet managed to trickle down to the general public." Science historian Ronald L. Numbers corroborates this view, writing that "Historians of science have known for years that White's and Draper's accounts are more propaganda than history. ...Yet the message has rarely escaped the ivory tower."
+While figures like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White are frequently cited in historical literature as the primary architects of the conflict thesis, historian James C. Ungureanu demonstrates this attribution is fundamentally misleading. In his work, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (2019), Ungureanu reveals that Draper and White were not, in fact, original theorists but rather popularizers who synthesized and amplified pre-existing 19th-century Protestant, anti-Catholic polemic. Ungureanu argues that both authors extensively borrowed rhetorical frameworks and historical examples crafted by progressive liberal theologians engaged in intra-Protestant debates seeking to reform Christianity against perceived Catholic-like dogmatism. Their influential narratives, therefore, were less objective historical accounts and more theologically motivated constructs, shaped by specific religious controversies (particularly anti-Catholicism and liberal Protestant agendas), thus undercutting the thesis's claim to universal historical truth. Ungureanu's scholarship reframes the origins of the conflict narrative as a product of partisan religious discourse rather than a neutral reading of the past.
+
+==== Trial of Galileo ====
+
+In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing observations made with his new telescope. These and other discoveries exposed difficulties with the understanding of the heavens that was common at the time. Scientists, along with the Catholic Church, had adopted Aristotle's view of the Earth as fixed in place, since Aristotle's rediscovery 300 years prior. Jeffrey Foss writes that, by Galileo's time, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe had become "fully integrated with Catholic theology".
+Scientists of the day largely rejected Galileo's assertions, since most had no telescope, and Galileo had no physical theory to explain how planets could orbit the Sun which, according to Aristotelian physics, was impossible. (That would not be resolved for another hundred years.) Galileo's peers alerted religious authorities to his "errors" and asked them to intervene. In response, the church forbade Galileo from teaching it, though it did not forbid discussing it, so long as it was clear it was merely a hypothesis. Galileo published books and asserted scientific superiority. He was summoned before the Roman Inquisition twice. First warned, he was next sentenced  to house arrest on a charge of "grave suspicion of heresy".
+The Galileo affair has been considered by many to be a defining moment in the history of the relationship between religion and science. Since the creation of the Conflict thesis by Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper in the late nineteenth century, religion has been depicted as oppressive and oppositional to science. Edward Daub explains that, while "twentieth century historians of science dismantled White and Draper's claims, it is still popular in public perception". Casting Galileo's story as a contest between science and religion is an oversimplification, writes Jeffrey Foss. Galileo was heir to a long scientific tradition with deep medieval Christian roots.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== Notes ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversazione-0.md

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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_History_and_Philosophy_of_Science,_University_of_Cambridge-0.md

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+---
+title: "Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_History_and_Philosophy_of_Science,_University_of_Cambridge"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:47.701211+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), of the University of Cambridge is the largest department of history and philosophy of science in the United Kingdom. A majority of its submissions received maximum ratings of 4* and 3* in the 2014 REF (Research Excellence Framework). Located in the historic buildings of the Old Physical Chemistry Laboratories on Free School Lane, Cambridge, the department teaches undergraduate courses towards the Cambridge Tripos and graduate courses including a taught Masters and PhD supervision in the field of HPS.  The department shares its premises with the Whipple Museum and Whipple Library which provide important resources for its teaching and research.
+
+
+== Academic staff ==
+The Department of HPS at Cambridge employs fifteen full-time teaching staff, approximately thirty research staff, numerous supervisors and research associates from departments and colleges across the University of Cambridge, in addition to external supervisors and examiners. A long-standing head of department was the noted Professor Peter Lipton, who served until his unexpected death in 2007. He was followed as head of department by the late Professor John Forrester, an international authority in the History of Mind, and a leading figure on Sigmund Freud and the history of psychoanalysis. Professor Jim Secord became head of the department in 2013 and was succeeded in 2016 by Professor Liba Taub. The current head is Professor Hasok Chang. Other senior   staff include Professor Tim Lewens, Professor Lauren Kassell, Professor Nick Hopwood and retired Professor Simon Schaffer.
+
+
+== Degree courses ==
+The department offers a nine-month MPhil course in history, philosophy and sociology of science, medicine and technology. It also supervises graduate students for the Cambridge PhD in HPS and provides advisors in the related fields of research in history, philosophy and social science.  Together with the Departments of Sociology and Social Anthropology, it also sponsors a nine-month MPhil in health, medicine and society.
+Undergraduate teaching and supervision is provided for students who have completed their first year at Cambridge.  Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the Cambridge Tripos system, undergraduates from a wide range of fields may study HPS, although entry is predominantly through the Natural Sciences Tripos. The resources of the Whipple Museum provide for first-hand study of scientific instruments which often provide topics for student dissertations.
+
+
+== History and philosophy of medicine ==
+The department is an active centre for the history of medicine and for philosophy of biomedical science and medical ethics. It played a major role in the Wellcome Trust funded Generation to Reproduction project at Cambridge, led by Professor Nick Hopwood, and hosted seminars and day conferences in this field. Another major Wellcome-funded project has made available a remarkable corpus of English medical casebooks from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dibner_Institute_for_the_History_of_Science_and_Technology-0.md

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+---
+title: "Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dibner_Institute_for_the_History_of_Science_and_Technology"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:48.831513+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology (1992–2006) was a research institute established at MIT, and housed in a renovated building (E56) on campus at 38 Memorial Drive, overlooking the Charles River.
+
+
+== Description ==
+At the heart of the Institute was the Burndy Library on the ground floor, initially containing 37,000 volumes on the history of science and technology  collected by the Dibner Fund.  The Library also possessed a large collection of antique scientific instruments, such as astrolabes, telescopes, microscopes, early spectrometers, and a Wimshurst machine, which were on public display in a dedicated gallery outside the library.  Also on display was a large collection of antique incandescent light bulbs, gas discharge tubes, electronic vacuum tubes, and other early examples of electrical and electronic technology.  The Library would mount occasional special exhibits, such as The Afterlife of Immortality: Obelisks Outside Egypt.
+The building was a modest Art Deco structure, fronting on Memorial Drive and the Charles River. Above the Library and display space, on the second and third floor were offices and lecture and seminar rooms.  The Institute held regular lectures, seminars, study programs, and an annual symposium in the history of science and technology.  Over the period of its existence, the Institute supported over 340 short- and longer-term fellowships.
+
+
+== History and development ==
+The Institute was named in honor of Bern Dibner (1897–1988), who had conceived of it before his death. The Institute was developed and supported by the Dibner Fund he had established in 1957, directed by his son David Dibner. The institute, from its inception, was run by executive director Evelyn Simha. On the academic side, the Institute was supported by a consortium of MIT, Boston University, Brandeis University and Harvard University.
+In 1995, the 600-volume Babson Collection of historical material related to Isaac Newton was placed on permanent deposit with the Burndy Library.  The collection had been assembled by Roger Babson, founder of Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and was previously housed at the College. In 1999, the addition of the 7,000-volume Volterra Collection from Italy increased the Burndy Library collection by more than a third.
+In 2004 MIT decided not to renew its affiliation, and the Dibner family began looking for a new location to house the collection.  David Dibner died unexpectedly in 2005.   The Dibner Institute closed in 2006, and the Burndy Library and associated collections were transferred to The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which now offers a Dibner History of Science Program to fund fellowships, a lecture series and annual conference. The acquisition of the Burndy Library (by then numbering 67,000 volumes) transformed the Huntington Library's collections in the history of science and technology into one of the world's largest in that field.
+The Huntington houses a permanent exhibition, Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World, in the 2,800-square-foot (260 m2) Dibner Hall of the History of Science that displays approximately 150 books, manuscripts, photographs and objects from both the Burndy Library and the Huntington's non-Burndy holdings in the history of science and medicine.   Approximately 200 antique light bulbs from the Burndy Collection are on display in the Beautiful Science exhibition. The light bulbs are not available for reference or research use, except by special arrangement. The status and accessibility of the Burndy collection of gas tubes, vacuum tubes, and electronic artifacts is not clear from the Huntington website.
+The Dibner Institute's former building was demolished in early 2007 to make way for new buildings for the MIT Sloan School of Management. The Dibner name remains at MIT, in the endowed Frances and David Dibner Professorship of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Wikipedia:Portraits from the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Legacy stub page at MIT
+Dibner Institute website as of August 31, 2006.  Archived by the Internet Archive.
+Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology, MIT Press

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity-0.md

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+---
+title: "Discovery of human antiquity"
+chunk: 1/4
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:51.332676+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The discovery of human antiquity was a major achievement of science in the middle of the 19th century, and the foundation of scientific paleoanthropology. The antiquity of man, human antiquity, or in simpler language the age of the human race, are names given to the series of scientific debates it involved, which with modifications continue in the 21st century. These debates have clarified and given scientific evidence, from a number of disciplines, towards solving the basic question of dating the first human being.
+Controversy was very active in this area in parts of the 19th century, with some dormant periods also. A key date was the 1859 re-evaluation of archaeological evidence that had been published 12 years earlier by Boucher de Perthes. It was then widely accepted, as validating the suggestion that man was much older than had previously been believed, for example than the 6,000 years implied by some traditional chronologies.
+In 1863 T. H. Huxley argued that man was an evolved species; and in 1864 Alfred Russel Wallace combined natural selection with the issue of antiquity. The arguments from science for what was then called the "great antiquity of man" became convincing to most scientists, over the following decade. The separate debate on the antiquity of man had in effect merged into the larger one on evolution, being simply a chronological aspect. It has not ended as a discussion, however, since the current science of human antiquity is still in flux.
+
+== Contemporary formulations ==
+
+Modern science has no single answer to the question of how old humanity is. What the question now means indeed depends on choosing genus or species in the required answer. It is thought that the genus of man has been around for ten times as long as our species. Currently, fresh examples of (extinct) species of the genus Homo are still being discovered, so that definitive answers are not available. The consensus view is that human beings are one species, the only existing species of the genus. With the rejection of polygenism for human origins, it is asserted that this species had a definite and single origin in the past. (That assertion leaves aside the point whether the origin meant is of the current species, however. The multiregional hypothesis allows the origin to be otherwise.) The hypothesis of recent African origin of modern humans is now widely accepted, and states that anatomically modern humans had a single origin, in Africa.
+The genus Homo is now estimated to be about 2.3 to 2.4 million years old, with the appearance of H. habilis; meaning that the existence of all types of humans has been within the Quaternary.
+
+Once the question is reformulated as dating the transition of the evolution of H. sapiens from a precursor species, the issue can be refined into two further questions. These are: the analysis and dating of the evolution of Archaic Homo sapiens, and of the evolution from "archaic" forms of the species H. sapiens sapiens. The second question is given an answer in two parts: anatomically modern humans are thought to be about 300,000 years old, with behavioral modernity dating back to 40,000 or 50,000 years ago. The first question is still subject to debates on its definition.
+
+== Historical debates ==
+Discovering the age of the first human is one facet of anthropogeny, the study of human origins, and a term dated by the Oxford English Dictionary to 1839 and the Medical Dictionary of Robert Hooper. Given the history of evolutionary thought, and the history of paleontology, the question of the antiquity of man became quite natural to ask at around this period. It was by no means a new question, but it was being asked in a new context of knowledge, particularly in comparative anatomy and palaeontology. The development of relative dating as a principled method allowed deductions of chronology relative to events tied to fossils and strata. This meant, though, that the issue of the antiquity of man was not separable from other debates of the period, on geology and foundations of scientific archaeology.
+The first strong scientific arguments for the antiquity of man as very different from accepted biblical chronology were certainly also strongly controverted. Those who found the conclusion unacceptable could be expected to examine the whole train of reasoning for weak points. This can be seen, for example, in the Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge (1871–3).
+For a period, once the scale of geological time had become clear in the 19th century, the "antiquity of man" stood for a theory opposed to the "modern origin of man", for which arguments of other kinds were put forward. The choice was logically independent of monogenism versus polygenism; but monogenism with the modern origin implied time scales on the basis of the geographical spread, physical differences and cultural diversity of humans. The choice was also logically independent of the notion of transmutation of species, but that was considered to be a slow process.
+William Benjamin Carpenter wrote in 1872 of a fixed conviction of the "modern origin" as the only reason for resisting the human creation of flint implements. Henry Williamson Haynes writing in 1880 could call the antiquity of man "an established fact".
+
+=== Theological debates ===
+The Biblical account included
+
+the story of the Garden of Eden and the descent of humans from a single couple;
+the story of the universal biblical Flood, after which all humans descended from Noah and his wife, and all animals from those saved in the Ark;
+genealogies providing in theory a way of dating events in the Old Testament (see Genealogy of the Bible).
+These points were debated by scholars as well as theologians. Biblical literalism was not a given in the medieval and early modern periods, for Christians or Jews.

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+---
+title: "Discovery of human antiquity"
+chunk: 2/4
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:51.332676+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+==== Human origins and the "universal deluge" debated ====
+The Flood could explain extinctions of species at that date, on the hypothesis that the Ark had not contained all species of animal. A Flood that was not universal, on the other hand, had implications for the biblical theory of races and Noah's sons. The theory of catastrophism, which was as much secular as theological in attitude, could be used in analogous ways.
+
+There was interest in matters arising from modification of the biblical narrative, therefore, and it was fuelled by the new knowledge of the world in early modern Europe, and then by the growth of the sciences. One hypothesis was of people not descended from Adam. This hypothesis of polygenism (no unique origin of humans) implied nothing on the antiquity of man, but the issue was implicated in counter-arguments, for monogenism.
+
+==== La Peyrère and the completeness of the Biblical account ====
+Isaac La Peyrère appealed in formulating his Preadamite theory of polygenism to Jewish tradition; it was intended to be compatible with the biblical creation of man. It was rejected by many contemporary theologians. This idea of humans before Adam had been current in earlier Christian scholars and those of unorthodox and heretical beliefs; La Peyrère's significance was his synthesis of the dissent. Influentially, he revived the classical idea of Marcus Terentius Varro, preserved in Censorinus, of a three-fold division of historical time into "uncertain" (to a universal flood), "mythical", and "historical" (with certain chronology).
+
+==== Debate on race ====
+The biblical narrative had implications for ethnology (division into Hamitic, Japhetic and Semitic peoples), and had its defenders, as well as those who felt it made significant omissions. Matthew Hale wrote his Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677) against La Peyrère, it has been suggested, in order to defend the propositions of a young human race and universal Flood, and the Native Americans as descended from Noah. Anthony John Maas writing in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia commented that pro-slavery sentiment indirectly supported the Preadamite theories of the middle of the 19th century. The antiquity of man found support in the opposed theories of monogenism of this time that justified abolitionism by discrediting scientific racism.
+Already in the 18th century polygenism was applied as a theory of race (see Scientific racism#Blumenbach and Buffon). A variant racist Preadamism was introduced, in particular by Reginald Stuart Poole (The Genesis of the Earth and of Man, London, 1860) and Dominic M'Causland (Adam and the Adamite, or the Harmony of Scripture and Ethnology, London, 1864). They followed the views of Samuel George Morton, Josiah C. Nott, George Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz; and maintained that Adam was the progenitor of the Caucasian race, while the other races descended from Preadamite ancestry.
+
+James Cowles Prichard argued against polygenism, wishing to support the account drawn from the Book of Genesis of a single human origin. In particular he argued that humans were one species, using the interfertility criterion of hybridity. By his use of a form of natural selection to argue for change of human skin colour as a historical process, he also implied a time scale long enough for such a process to have produced the observed differences.
+
+==== Incompatible views of chronology ====
+The Early Christian Church contested claims that pagan traditions were older than that of the Bible. Theophilus of Antioch and Augustine of Hippo both argued against Egyptian views that the world was at least 100,000 years old. This figure was too high to be compatible with biblical chronology. One of La Peyrère's propositions, that China was at least 10,000 years old, gained wider currency; Martino Martini had provided details of traditional Chinese chronology, from which it was deduced by Isaac Vossius that Noah's Flood was local rather than universal.
+One of the considerations detected in La Peyrère by Otto Zöckler was concern with the Antipodes and their people: were they pre-Adamites, or indeed had there been a second "Adam of the Antipodes"? In a 19th-century sequel, Alfred Russel Wallace in an 1867 book review pointed to the Pacific Islanders as posing a problem for those holding both to monogenism and a recent date for human origins. In other words, he took migration from an original location to remote islands that are now populated to imply a long time scale. A significant consequence of the recognition of the antiquity of man was the greater scope for conjectural history, in particular for all aspects of diffusionism and social evolutionism.
+
+==== Creation of man in a world not ready ====
+While extinction of species came with the development of geology to be widely accepted in the early 19th century, there was resistance on theological grounds to extinctions after the creation of man. It was argued, in particular in the 1820s and 1830s, that man would not be created into an "imperfect" world as far as design of its collection of species was concerned. This reasoning cut across that which was conclusive for the science of the antiquity of man, a generation later.
+
+=== Archaeological context ===
+The late 18th century was a period in which French and German caves were explored, and remains taken for study: caving was in fashion, if speleology was only in its infancy, and the St. Beatus Caves, for example, attracted many visitors. Caves were a theme of the art of the time, also. Cave remains proved of great importance to the science of the antiquity of man. Stalagmite formation was a clearcut mechanism of formation of fossils, and its stratigraphy could be understood. Other sites of importance were associated with alluvial deposits of gravel and clay, or peat. The early example of the Gray's Inn Lane Hand Axe was from gravel in a bed of a tributary of the River Thames, but remained isolated for about a century.

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+---
+title: "Discovery of human antiquity"
+chunk: 3/4
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:51.332676+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The three-age system was in place from about 1820, in the form given to it by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in his work on the collections that became the National Museum of Denmark. He published his ideas in 1836. Postulating cultural change, in itself and without explaining a rate of change, did not generate reasons to revise traditional chronology. But the concept of Stone Age artifacts became current. Thomsen's book in Danish, Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed, was translated into German (Leitfaden zur Nordischen Alterthumskunde, 1837), and English (Guide to Northern Archæology, 1848).
+John Frere's 1797 discovery of the Hoxne handaxe helped to initiate the 19th century debate, but it started in earnest around 1810. There were then a number of false starts relating to different European sites. William Buckland misjudged what he had found in 1823 with the misnamed Red Lady of Paviland, and explained away the mammoth remains with the find. He also was dismissive of the Kent's Cavern findings of John MacEnery in the later 1820s. In 1829 Philippe-Charles Schmerling discovered a Neanderthal fossil skull (at Engis). At that point, however, its significance was not recognised, and Rudolf Virchow consistently opposed the theory that it was very old. The 1847 book Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes by Boucher de Perthes about Saint-Acheul was found unconvincing in its presentation, until it was reconsidered about a decade later.
+
+The debate moved on only in the context of
+
+further stone tools that were admitted to be made by Stone Age man, found
+on sites where the stratigraphy could be argued to be clear and undisturbed, with
+remains of animals that were (in the consensus of palaeontologists) now extinct.
+It was this combination, "extinct faunal remains" + "human artifacts", that provided the evidence that came to be seen as crucial. A sudden acceleration of research was seen from mid-1858, when the Geological Society set up a "cave committee". Besides Hugh Falconer who had pressed for it, the committee comprised Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, William Pengelly, Joseph Prestwich, and Andrew Ramsay.
+
+=== Debate on uniformity and change ===
+
+On the one hand, lack of uniformity in prehistory is what gave science traction on the question of the antiquity of man; and, on the other hand, there were at the time theories that tended to rule out certain types of lack of regularity. John Lubbock outlined in 1890 the way the antiquity of man had in his time been established as derived from change in prehistory: in fauna, geography and climate. The hypotheses required to establish that these changes were facts of prehistory were themselves in tension with the uniformitarianism that was held to by some scientists; therefore the protean concept "uniformitarianism" was adjusted to accommodate the past changes that could be established.
+Zoological uniformity on earth was debated already in the early eighteenth century. 
+George Berkeley argued in Alciphron that the lack of human artifacts in deeper excavations suggested a recent origin of man. Evidence of absence was, of course, seen as problematic to establish. Gottfried Leibniz in his Protogaea produced arguments against identification of a species via morphology, without evidence of descent (having in mind a characterisation of humans by possession of reason); and against the discreteness of species and their extinction.
+Uniformitarianism held the field against the competitor theories of Neptunism and catastrophism, which partook of Romantic science and theological cosmogony; it established itself as the successor of Plutonism, and became the foundation of modern geology. Its tenets were correspondingly firmly held. Charles Lyell put forward at one point views on what were called "uniformity of kind" and "uniformity of degree" that were incompatible with what was argued later. Lyell's theory, in fact, was of a "steady state" geology, which he deduced from his principles. This went too far in restricting actual geological processes, to a predictable closed system, if it ruled out ice ages (see ice ages#Causes of ice ages), as became clearer not long after Lyell's Principles of Geology appeared (1830–3). Of Lubbock's three types of change, the geographical included the theory of migration over land bridges in biogeography, which in general acted as an explanatory stopgap, rather than in most cases being one supported by science. Sea level changes were easier to justify.
+
+=== Glacial conditions ===
+
+The identification of ice ages was important context for the antiquity of man because it was accepted that certain mammals had died out with the last of the ice ages which were clearly marked in the geological record. Georges Cuvier's Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (1812) had accepted facts of the extinctions of mammals that were to be relevant to human antiquity. The concept of an ice age was proposed in 1837 by Louis Agassiz, and it opened the way to the study of glacial history of the Quaternary. William Buckland came to see evidence of glaciers in what he had taken to be remains of the biblical Flood. It seemed adequately proved that the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros were mammals of the ice ages, and had ceased to exist with the ice ages: they inhabited Europe when it was tundra, and not afterwards. In fact such extinct mammals were typically found in diluvium as it was then called (distinctive gravel or boulder clay).
+
+Given that the animals were associated with these strata, establishing the date of the strata could be by geological arguments, based on uniformity of stratigraphy; and so the animals' extinction was dated. An extinction can still strictly only be dated on assumptions, as evidence of absence; for a particular site, however, the argument can be from local extinction.
+Neither Agassiz nor Buckland adopted the new views on the antiquity of man.

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+title: "Discovery of human antiquity"
+chunk: 4/4
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:51.332676+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Acceptance of human association with extinct animal species ===
+Boucher de Perthes had written up discoveries in the Somme valley in 1847. Joseph Prestwich and John Evans in April 1859, and Charles Lyell with others also in 1859, made field trips to the sites, and returned convinced that humans had coexisted with extinct mammals. In general and qualitative terms, Lyell felt the evidence established the "antiquity of man": that humans were much older than the traditional assumptions had made them. His conclusions were shared by the Royal Society and other British learned institutions, as well as in France. It was this recognition of the early date of Acheulean handaxes that first established the scientific credibility of the deep antiquity of humans.
+
+This debate was concurrent with that over the book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and was evidently related; but was not one in which Charles Darwin initially made his own views public. Consolidation of the "antiquity of man" required more work, with stricter methods; and this proved possible over the next two decades. The discoveries of Boucher de Perthes therefore motivated further researches to try to repeat and confirm the findings at other sites. Significant in this were excavations by William Pengelly at Brixham Cavern, and with a systematic approach at Kents Cavern (1865–1880). Another major project, which produced quicker findings, was that of Henry Christy and Édouard Lartet. Lartet in 1860 had published results from a cave near Massat (Ariège) claiming stone tool cuts on bones of extinct mammals, made when the bones were fresh.
+
+== List of key sites for the 19th century debate ==
+
+== Further issues ==
+
+=== Antiquity of man in the New World ===
+
+=== Tertiary Man ===
+When the science was considered reasonably settled as to the existence of "Quaternary Man" (humans of the Pleistocene), there remained the issue as to whether man had existed in the Tertiary, a now obsolete term used for the preceding geological period. The debate on the antiquity of man resonated in the later debate over eoliths, which were supposed proof of the existence of man in the Pliocene (during the Neogene). In this case the sceptical view won out.
+
+== Publications ==
+
+=== Publications of the central years of the debate ===
+Édouard Lartet, The Antiquity of Man in Western Europe (1860)
+——, New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mammifers characteristic of the Last Geological Period (1861)
+Charles Lyell, Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863). It was a major synthesis that discussed the issue of human antiquity, in parallel with the further issues of the Ice Ages and human evolution that promised to throw light on the origins of man.
+T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863)
+Alfred Russel Wallace, The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection' (1864)
+James Geikie, The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1874).
+
+=== Publications of the latter stages of the debate ===
+John Patterson MacLean, A Manual of the Antiquity of Man (1877)
+James Cocke Southall, The Epoch of the Mammoth and the Apparition of man upon the Earth (1878)
+William Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period (1880)
+Richard Owen, Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (1884)
+George Frederick Wright, The Ice Age in North America, and its Bearings upon the Antiquity of Man (1889)
+George Grant MacCurdy, Recent Discoveries Bearing on the Antiquity of Man in Europe (1910)
+George Frederick Wright, Origin and Antiquity of Man (1912)
+Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (1915)
+
+== See also ==
+Tool use by animals
+List of first human settlements
+
+== References ==
+Citations
+
+Sources
+ This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Preadamites". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

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+title: "Doctrine of signatures"
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_signatures"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:52.473646+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The doctrine of signatures, also known as the doctrine of correspondences, is a biomedicinal theory of pseudoscience. It states that herbs or animals have physical or behavioral traits that mirror the ailment it can successfully treat. Theological justifications, such as that of botanist William Cole, were that God would want to show men what plants would be useful for. The doctrine of signatures has a debated origin. Many historians believe it begins with primitive thinking methods, while other historians believe it originated with Dioscorides and was popularized in the 16th and 17th centuries after Jakob Böhme coined the doctrine of signatures in his book The Signature of All Things. 
+This theory is a possible explanation for the ancient discovery of medicinal properties; however, there is no definitive proof as to whether the medicinal property or the connection in physical/behavioral traits was realized first. The theory later became a scientific basis for trying new remedies solely based upon their qualities in an attempt to find new medicines. While there are some homeopathic remedies that are still used today which have been connected to this theory, there are also remedies from this theory which have been found harmful. For instance, birthwort (so-called because of its resemblance to the uterus) was once used widely for pregnancies, but is carcinogenic and very damaging to the kidneys, owing to its aristolochic acid content. As a defense against predation, many plants contain toxic chemicals, the action of which is not immediately apparent or easily tied to the plant rather than other factors.
+
+== History ==
+
+The origins of the doctrine of signatures are debated by historians. The concept of the doctrine of signatures dates back to Hippocratic medicine and the belief that "cures for human ills were divinely revealed in nature, often through plants." The concept would be further developed by Dioscorides. Dioscorides would provide ample descriptions of plant medications through various drawings, detailing the importance of their look, name, shelf life, how to tell when plants have gone bad, and how to properly harvest the crop for medical use. Paracelsus (1493–1541) developed the concept further, writing that "nature marks each growth ... according to its curative benefit", and it was further developed by Giambattista della Porta in his Phytognomonica (1588).
+The writings of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) coined the term "doctrine of signatures" within his book The Signature of All Things (or Signatura Rerum), published in 1621. He suggested that God marked objects with a sign, or "signature", for their purpose, specifically that "to that Signature, his inward form is noted in the form of his face; and thus also is a beast, an herb, and the trees; every thing as it is inwardly [in its innate virtue and quality] so it is outwardly signed". Plants bearing parts that resembled human body parts, animals, or other objects were thought to have useful relevance to those parts, animals, or objects. The "signature" could sometimes also be identified in the environments or specific sites in which plants grew. 
+The English physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, in his discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658), uses the quincunx pattern as an archetype of the 'doctrine of signatures' pervading the design of gardens and orchards, botany, and the macrocosm at large.
+The 17th-century botanist William Coles supposed that God had made "Herbes for the use of men, and hath given them particular Signatures, whereby a man may read the use of them." Coles's The Art of Simpling and Adam in Eden, stated that walnuts were good for curing head ailments because, in his opinion, "They have the perfect signatures of the head." Regarding Hypericum, he wrote, "The little holes whereof the leaves of Saint Johns wort are full, doe resemble all the pores of the skin and therefore it is profitable for all hurts and wounds that can happen thereunto."
+In the late 19th century, Andrew Dickson White published his book History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, which pushed back against the doctrine of signatures. White explains the connectiveness between Christianity and the doctrine of signatures as its increased presence and significance in the orthodox faith as theological pseudoscience. White further explains how the doctrine of signatures developed into the church as a justification to "[disgust] the demon with the body which he tormented" and how "the patient was made to swallow or apply to himself various unspeakable ordures", with various uses of animal organs as medications to protect against demons.
+For the late medieval viewer, the natural world was vibrant with images of the Deity: 'as above, so below', a Hermetic principle expressed as the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; the principle is rendered sicut in terra. Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:
+
+Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. (The Order of Things, p. 17)Late 20th-century mentions of the doctrine of signatures include five cited publications in the 1996 Economic Botany Index (1947–1996). In the early 21st century, Amots Dafni and Efraim Lev conducted a survey and used literature to understand how the doctrine of signatures has evolved in the Middle East. Their studies show that the doctrine of signatures evolved into four main categories: "similarity of the plant or plant organ to the damaged human organ, similarity to animal shape or behavior, similarity of plant color to the color of the disease's symptoms or the medical phenomena, and similarity of plant habitat or characteristic to human features."
+
+== Linked remedies ==

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+title: "Doctrine of signatures"
+chunk: 2/2
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:52.473646+00:00"
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+---
+
+It is worth noting that it is possible that these are post hoc attributions—the appearance and treatment linked after the medicinal property was discovered. Depending on the article, remedies connected to the doctrine vary in number and consistency.
+
+== Scientific, spiritual, and social context ==
+Signatures are often described as post hoc attributions and mnemonics used to remember the properties of a plant rather than the reason it was originally used. There is no scientific or historical evidence that plant shapes and colors have aided in the discovery of their medical uses.
+In Europe, the idea of doctrine of signatures was linked with Christian beliefs. However, similar theories were created within black magic with sympathetic magic. Similar theories have been observed all over the world in ancient Egypt, China, pre-Columbian America, and the Middle East. This can also explain how varied, and at times contradictory, applications of the doctrine can be because traditional botany is subject to optimal foraging theory. Remedies would, in many cases, be based on the environmental availability of that resource rather than its objective effectiveness.
+Some sociologists frame the doctrine of signatures as a type of "enchantment", the idea that it is not just what one observes but how they observe it, and it was a device used to elevate a group of "elite" observers who could interpret the world with more accuracy. In this context, the elite observers would be those that, for example, notice that lungwort's leaves look like lung tissue rather than positing that the dark red flowers could look like blood clots or the pink petals like irritated skin. The idea being that within many descriptors, the "correct" one that links to the signature could only be found by someone within this elite group.
+There are similar yet conflicting theories like the theory of opposites, where Galen supposed that a cold and wet thing could be used to treat an imbalance in a hot and dry organ. Hypotheses like these and the questions they posed, regardless of the validity of the hypotheses themselves, inspired scientific investigations into the safety and usefulness of many plant-based remedies.
+
+== In literature ==
+The phrase "signatures of all things" appears in the beginning of episode three in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. The character Stephen Dedalus is walking along the beach, thinking to himself, "Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot". The Canadian poet Anne Szumigalski, 1922–1999, entitled her third full-length collection Doctrine of Signatures.
+
+== See also ==
+Table of magical correspondences
+Sympathetic magic
+Naturalistic fallacy
+Pictogram
+
+== References ==
+Citations
+
+Bibliography
+
+== Further reading ==
+Boehme, Jakob (1651) Signatura Rerum (The Signature of All Things). Gyles Calvert.
+--- Translation by J. Ellistone.
+Buchanan, Scott Milross (1938) The doctrine of signatures: a defense of theory in medicine.
+Cole, W. (1657) Adam in Eden or Nature's Paradise. J Streater for Nathanial Brooke.
+Conrad, L.I.; M Neve, V Nutton and R Porter (1995). The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC – 1800 AD. Cambridge University Press.
+Porter, Roy (1997) The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. HarperCollins.

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+---
+title: "Dyson sphere"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:53.646045+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
+The earliest modern imagining of such a structure was by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker (1937). The same concept was later used by physicist Freeman Dyson in his 1960 paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. A signature of such spheres detected in astronomical searches would be an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence.
+Since Dyson's paper, many variant designs involving an artificial structure or series of structures to encompass a star have been proposed in exploratory engineering or described in science fiction, often under the name "Dyson sphere". Fictional depictions often describe a solid shell of matter enclosing a star – an arrangement Dyson himself  considered impossible. The sphere he imagined consisted of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star, an arrangement that has become known as a Dyson swarm.
+
+== Origins ==
+
+Inspired by the 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson was the first to formalize the concept of what became known as the "Dyson sphere" in his 1960 Science paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation". Dyson theorized that as the energy requirements of an advanced technological civilization increased, there would come a time when it would need to systematically harvest the energy from its local star on a large scale. He speculated that this could be done via a system of structures orbiting the star, designed to intercept and collect its energy. He argued that as the structure would result in the large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation, an earth-based search for sources of infrared radiation could identify stars supporting intelligent life.
+Dyson did not detail how such a system could be constructed, simply referring to it in the paper as a "shell" or "biosphere". He later clarified that he did not have in mind a solid structure, saying: "A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of 'biosphere' which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star." Such a concept has often been referred to as a "Dyson swarm"; however, in 2013, Dyson said he had come to regret that the concept had been named after him. In an interview with Robert Wright in 2003, Dyson referred to his paper on the search for Dyson spheres as "a little joke" and commented that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious", later explaining that "And of course the joke is that the sky is crawling with infrared sources which look just the way a Type II civilization might look, so there is absolutely no reason to believe that they are artificial ... from our distance they would look the same". However, in a later interview with students from The University of Edinburgh in 2018, he referred to the premise of the Dyson sphere as being "correct and uncontroversial". In other interviews, while lamenting the naming of the object, Dyson commented that "the idea was a good one", and referred to his contribution to a paper on disassembling planets as a means of constructing one.
+
+== Search for megastructures ==
+Dyson-style energy collectors around a distant star would absorb and re-radiate energy from the star. The wavelengths of such re-radiated energy may be atypical for the star's spectral type, due to the presence of heavy elements not naturally occurring within the star. If the percentage of such atypical wavelengths were to be significant, an alien megastructure could be detected at interstellar distances. This could indicate the presence of what has been called a Type II Kardashev civilization.
+SETI has looked for such infrared-heavy spectra from solar analogs, as has Fermilab. Fermilab discovered 17 potential "ambiguous" candidates, of which four were in 2006 called "amusing but still questionable". Later searches also resulted in several candidates, all of which remain unconfirmed.
+On October 14, 2015, Planet Hunters' citizen scientists discovered unusual light fluctuations of the star KIC 8462852 raising press speculation that a Dyson sphere may have been discovered. However, subsequent analysis showed that the results were consistent with the presence of dust. In 2024 there was press speculation that potential signs of interstellar Dyson spheres had been discovered.  The seven objects of interest – all located within a thousand light-years of Earth – were M-dwarfs, a class of stars that are smaller and less luminous than the Sun. However, the authors of the findings were careful not to make any overblown claims. Despite this, many media outlets picked up on the story. Less fantastical explanations included a suggestion that the detected infrared was caused by distant dust-obscured galaxies.

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+title: "Dyson sphere"
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+category: "reference"
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Feasibility and science-based speculation ==
+Although Dyson spheres in the form of a swarm are theoretically possible, building a stable megastructure around the Sun is currently far beyond humanity's engineering capacity. The number of craft required to obtain, transmit, and maintain a complete Dyson sphere exceeds present-day industrial capabilities. Dyson spheres have prompted speculation into the feasibility of a class of proposed stellar engines, hypothetical megastructures whose purpose is to extract useful energy from a star, sometimes for specific purposes. For example, Matrioshka brains have been proposed to use energy extracted by Dyson spheres for computation, while Shkadov thrusters would extract energy for propulsion. Some proposed stellar engine designs are based on the Dyson sphere. Futurist George Dvorsky has advocated the use of self-replicating robots to overcome the limitation of humanity's engineering capacity in the relatively near term. Some have suggested that Dyson sphere habitats could be built around white dwarfs or pulsars.
+In 2022 it was suggested that a Dyson swarm around the Sun could be launched from either Mercury or Mars. In order to transmit the energy back, far-field radiative wireless power transfer was proposed, a technology that is not yet fully developed.
+
+== Fictional examples ==
+A precursor to the concept of Dyson spheres was featured in the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, in which he described "every solar system... surrounded by a gauze of light-traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use"; Dyson got his inspiration from this book and suggested that "Stapledon sphere" would be a more apt name for the concept. Fictional Dyson spheres are typically solid structures forming a continuous shell around the star in question, although Dyson himself considered that prospect to be mechanically impossible. They are sometimes used as the type of plot device known as a Big Dumb Object.
+Dyson spheres appear as a background element in many works of fiction, including the 1964 novel The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber where aliens enclose multiple stars in this way. Dyson spheres are depicted in the 1975–1983 book series Saga of Cuckoo by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, and one functions as the setting of Bob Shaw's 1975 novel Orbitsville and its sequels. In the 1992 episode "Relics" of the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, the USS Enterprise finds itself trapped in an abandoned Dyson sphere; in a 2011 interview, Dyson said that he enjoyed the episode, although he considered the sphere depicted to be "nonsense". Michael Jan Friedman who wrote the novelization observed that in the TV episode itself the Dyson sphere was effectively a MacGuffin, with "just nothing about it" in the story, and decided to flesh out the plot element in his novelization.
+Other science-fiction story examples include Tony Rothman's The World Is Round, Somtow Sucharitkul's Inquestor series, Timothy Zahn's Spinneret, James White's Federation World, Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, and Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star. Variations on the Dyson sphere concept include a single circular band in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld, a half sphere in the 2012 novel Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Niven, and nested spheres – also known as a Matrioshka brain – in Colin Kapp's 1980s Cageworld series and Brian Stableford's 1979–1990 Asgard trilogy.
+Stableford observed that Dyson spheres are usually treated as MacGuffins or relegated to the background of narratives, citing examples such as Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer and Linda Nagata’s Deception Well. Stories in which the concept is explored tend to use variants such as Larry Niven's Ringworld. He identified two reasons for this. First, the sheer scale of a Dyson sphere makes it difficult to address within the constraints of most narratives; Friedman pointed that he had avoided the issue in his novelisation of “Relics” as the book was only four hundred pages long and he had just shy of four weeks to write it. Secondly, particularly in hard science fiction, Dyson spheres present engineering challenges that complicate their use in storytelling. One such difficulty arises from the shell theorem: within a spherical shell, gravitational forces are in equilibrium, so additional mechanisms such as rotation are required to provide effective gravity at the interior surface. This in turn introduces further complications, including a gravity gradient that diminishes to zero at the poles. Authors have addressed these issues through various modifications of the concept, including Stableford’s Cageworld nesting, Dan Alderson’s double-sphere idea, and Niven’s reduced ringworld design.
+
+== See also ==
+Alderson disk – Hypothetical artificial solar megastructure
+Astronomical engineering – Form of megascale engineering
+List of hypothetical technologies – Possible future technology
+Space elevator – Proposed type of space transportation system
+Stellar engine – Class of hypothetical megastructures
+Tabby's Star – Star noted for unusual dimming events
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+Gunn, Alastair (December 29, 2022). "Dyson spheres: How humans (and aliens) could capture a star's energy". BBC Science Focus. Archived from the original on March 11, 2024. Retrieved March 20, 2024.
+Mann, Adam (August 1, 2019). "What is a Dyson sphere?". Space.com. Archived from the original on March 7, 2024. Retrieved March 20, 2024.
+Schulze-Makuch, Dirk (January 29, 2014). "Dyson Spheres: Still Missing, Maybe Impossible". Smithsonian Magazine. Archived from the original on September 28, 2023. Retrieved March 20, 2024.
+Stableford, Brian (2004). "Dyson Sphere". Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature. Scarecrow Press. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-8108-4938-9.
+Stanway, Elizabeth (May 21, 2023). "Megastructures". Warwick University. Cosmic Stories Blog. Archived from the original on May 26, 2023. Retrieved March 25, 2024.
+
+== External links ==
+
+Dyson sphere FAQ
+FermiLab: IRAS-based whole sky upper limit on Dyson spheres with an appendix on Dyson sphere engineering
+Dyson sphere at Memory Alpha

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+
+Science in classical antiquity encompasses inquiries into the workings of the world or universe aimed at both practical goals (e.g., establishing a reliable calendar or determining how to cure a variety of illnesses) as well as more abstract investigations belonging to natural philosophy. Classical antiquity is traditionally defined as the period between the 8th century BC (beginning of Archaic Greece) and the 6th century AD (after which there was medieval science). It is typically limited geographically to the Greco-Roman West, Mediterranean basin, and Ancient Near East, thus excluding traditions of science in the ancient world in regions such as China and the Indian subcontinent.
+Ideas regarding nature that were theorized during classical antiquity were not limited to science but included myths as well as religion. Those who are now considered as the first scientists may have thought of themselves as natural philosophers, as practitioners of a skilled profession (e.g., physicians), or as followers of a religious tradition (e.g., temple healers). Some of the more widely known figures active in this period include Hippocrates, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchus, Galen, and Ptolemy. Their contributions and commentaries spread throughout the Eastern, Islamic, and Latin worlds and contributed to the birth of modern science. Their works covered many different categories including mathematics, cosmology, medicine, and physics.
+
+== Classical Greece ==
+
+=== Knowledge of causes ===
+This subject inquires into the nature of things first began out of practical concerns among the ancient Greeks. For instance, an attempt to establish a calendar is first exemplified by the Works and Days of the Greek poet Hesiod, who lived around 700 BC. Hesiod's calendar was meant to regulate seasonal activities by the seasonal appearances and disappearances of the stars, as well as by the phases of the Moon, which were held to be propitious or ominous. Around 450 BC we begin to see compilations of the seasonal appearances and disappearances of the stars in texts known as parapegmata, which were used to regulate the civil calendars of the Greek city-states on the basis of astronomical observations.
+Medicine is another area where practically oriented investigations of nature took place during this period. Greek medicine was not the province of a single trained profession and there was no accepted method of qualification of licensing. Physicians in the Hippocratic tradition, temple healers associated with the cult of Asclepius, herb collectors, drug sellers, midwives, and gymnastic trainers all claimed to be qualified as healers in specific contexts and competed actively for patients. This rivalry among these competing traditions contributed to an active public debate about the causes and proper treatment of disease, and about the general methodological approaches of their rivals.
+An example of the search for causal explanations is found in the Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease, which deals with the nature of epilepsy. In it, the author attacks his rivals (temple healers) for their ignorance in attributing epilepsy to divine wrath, and for their love of gain. Although the author insists that epilepsy has a natural cause, when it comes to explain what that cause is and what the proper treatment would be, the explanation is as short on specific evidence and the treatment as vague as that of his rivals. Nonetheless, observations of natural phenomena continued to be compiled in an effort to determine their causes, as for instance in the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, who wrote extensively on animals and plants. Theophrastus also produced the first systematic attempt to classify minerals and rocks, a summary of which is found in Pliny's Natural History.
+The legacy of Greek science in this era included substantial advances in factual knowledge due to empirical research (e.g., in zoology, botany, mineralogy, and astronomy), an awareness of the importance of certain scientific problems (e.g., the problem of change and its causes), and a recognition of the methodological significance of establishing criteria for truth (e.g., applying mathematics to natural phenomena), despite the lack of universal consensus in any of these areas.
+
+=== Pre-Socratic philosophy ===
+
+==== Materialist philosophers ====

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+
+The earliest Greek philosophers, known as the pre-Socratics, were materialists who provided alternative answers to the same question found in the myths of their neighbors: "How did the ordered cosmos in which we live come to be?" Although the question is much the same, their answers and their attitude towards the answers is markedly different. As reported by such later writers as Aristotle, their explanations tended to center on the material source of things.
+Thales of Miletus (624–546 BC) considered that all things came to be from and find their sustenance in water.  Anaximander (610–546 BC) then suggested that things could not come from a specific substance like water, but rather from something he called the "boundless". Exactly what he meant is uncertain but it has been suggested that it was boundless in its quantity, so that creation would not fail; in its qualities, so that it would not be overpowered by its contrary; in time, as it has no beginning or end; and in space, as it encompasses all things.  Anaximenes (585–525 BC) returned to a concrete material substance, air, which could be altered by rarefaction and condensation.  He adduced common observations (the wine stealer) to demonstrate that air was a substance and a simple experiment (breathing on one's hand) to show that it could be altered by rarefaction and condensation.
+Heraclitus of Ephesus (about 535–475 BC), then maintained that change, rather than any substance was fundamental, although the element fire seemed to play a central role in this process.  Finally, Empedocles of Acragas (490–430 BC), seems to have combined the views of his predecessors, asserting that there are four elements (Earth, Water, Air and Fire) which produce change by mixing and separating under the influence of two opposing "forces" that he called Love and Strife.
+All these theories imply that matter is a continuous substance.  Two Greek philosophers, Leucippus (first half of the 5th century BC) and Democritus came up with the notion that there were two real entities: atoms, which were small indivisible particles of matter, and the void, which was the empty space in which matter was located.  Although all the explanations from Thales to Democritus involve matter, what is more important is the fact that these rival explanations suggest an ongoing process of debate in which alternate theories were put forth and criticized.
+Xenophanes of Colophon prefigured paleontology and geology as he thought that periodically the earth and sea mix and turn all to mud, citing several fossils of sea creatures that he had seen.
+
+==== Pythagorean philosophy ====
+
+The materialist explanations of the origins of the cosmos were attempts at answering the question of how an organized universe came to be; however, the idea of a random assemblage of elements (e.g., fire or water) producing an ordered universe without the existence of some ordering principle remained problematic to some.
+One answer to this problem was advanced by the followers of Pythagoras (c. 582–507 BC), who saw number as the fundamental unchanging entity underlying all the structure of the universe. Although it is difficult to separate fact from legend, it appears that some Pythagoreans believed matter to be made up of ordered arrangements of points according to geometrical principles: triangles, squares, rectangles, or other figures. Other Pythagoreans saw the universe arranged on the basis of numbers, ratios, and proportions, much like musical scales. Philolaus, for instance, held that there were ten heavenly bodies because the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 gives the perfect number 10. Thus, the Pythagoreans were some of the first to apply mathematical principles to explain the rational basis of an orderly universe—an idea that was to have immense consequences in the development of scientific thought.
+
+==== Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Corpus ====
+According to tradition, the physician Hippocrates of Kos (460–370 BC) is considered the "father of medicine" because he was the first to make use of prognosis and clinical observation, to categorize diseases, and to formulate the ideas behind humoral theory. However, most of the Hippocratic Corpus—a collection of medical theories, practices, and diagnoses—was often attributed to Hippocrates with very little justification, thus making it difficult to know what Hippocrates actually thought, wrote, and did.
+Despite their wide variability in terms of style and method, the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus had a significant influence on the medical practice of Islamic and Western medicine for more than a thousand years.
+
+=== Schools of philosophy ===
+
+==== The Academy ====

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+
+The first institution of higher learning in Ancient Greece was founded by Plato (c. 427 – c. 347 BC), an Athenian who—perhaps under Pythagorean influence—appears to have identified the ordering principle of the universe as one based on number and geometry. A later account has it that Plato had inscribed at the entrance to the academy the words "Let no man ignorant of geometry enter." Although the story is most likely a myth, it nonetheless testifies to Plato's interest in mathematics, which is alluded to in several of his dialogues.
+Plato's philosophy maintained that all material things are imperfect reflections of eternal unchanging ideas, just as all mathematical diagrams are reflections of eternal unchanging mathematical truths. Since Plato believed that material things had an inferior kind of reality, he considered that demonstrative knowledge cannot be achieved by looking at the imperfect material world. Truth is to be found through rational argumentation, analogous to the demonstrations of mathematicians. For instance, Plato recommended that astronomy be studied in terms of abstract geometrical models rather than empirical observations, and proposed that leaders be trained in mathematics in preparation for philosophy.
+Aristotle (384–322 BC) studied at the academy and nonetheless disagreed with Plato in several important respects. While he agreed that truth must be eternal and unchanging, Aristotle maintained that the world is knowable through experience and that we come to know the truth by what we perceive with our senses. For him, directly observable things are real; ideas (or as he called them, forms) only exist as they express themselves in matter, such as in living things, or in the mind of an observer or artisan.
+Aristotle's theory of reality led to a different approach to science. Unlike Plato, Aristotle emphasized observation of the material entities which embody the forms. He also played down (but did not negate) the importance of mathematics in the study of nature. The process of change took precedence over Plato's focus on eternal unchanging ideas in Aristotle's philosophy. Finally, he reduced the importance of Plato's forms to one of four causal factors.
+Aristotle thus distinguished between four causes:
+
+the matter of which a thing was made (the material cause).
+the form into which it was made (the formal cause; similar to Plato's ideas).
+the agent who made the thing (the moving or efficient cause).
+the purpose for which the thing was made (the final cause).
+Aristotle insisted that scientific knowledge (Ancient Greek: ἐπιστήμη, Latin: scientia) is knowledge of necessary causes. He and his followers would not accept mere description or prediction as science. Most characteristic of Aristotle's causes is his final cause, the purpose for which a thing is made. He came to this insight through his biological researches, such as those of marine animals at Lesbos, in which he noted that the organs of animals serve a particular function:
+
+The absence of chance and the serving of ends are found in the works of nature especially. And the end for the sake of which a thing has been constructed or has come to be belongs to what is beautiful.
+
+==== The Lyceum ====
+
+After Plato's death, Aristotle left the academy and traveled widely before returning to Athens to found a school adjacent to the Lyceum. As one of the most prolific natural philosophers of Antiquity, Aristotle wrote and lecture on many topics of scientific interest, including biology, meteorology, psychology, logic, and physics. He developed a comprehensive physical theory that was a variation of the classical theory of the elements (earth, water, fire, air, and aether). In his theory, the light elements (fire and air) have a natural tendency to move away from the center of the universe while the heavy elements (earth and water) have a natural tendency to move toward the center of the universe, thereby forming a spherical Earth. Since the celestial bodies (i.e., the planets and stars) were seen to move in circles, he concluded that they must be made of a fifth element, which he called aether.
+Aristotle used intuitive ideas to justify his reasoning and could point to the falling stone, rising flames, or pouring water to illustrate his theory. His laws of motion emphasized the common observation that friction was an omnipresent phenomenon: that any body in motion would, unless acted upon, come to rest. He also proposed that heavier objects fall faster, and that voids were impossible.
+Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum was Theophrastus, who wrote valuable books describing plant and animal life. His works are regarded as the first to put botany and zoology on a systematic footing. Theophrastus' work on mineralogy provided descriptions of ores and minerals known to the world at that time, making some shrewd observations of their properties. For example, he made the first known reference to the phenomenon that the mineral tourmaline attracts straws and bits of wood when heated, now known to be caused by pyroelectricity. Pliny the Elder makes clear references to his use of the work in his Natural History, while updating and making much new information available on minerals himself. From both these early texts was to emerge the science of mineralogy, and ultimately geology. Both authors describe the sources of the minerals they discuss in the various mines exploited in their time, so their works should be regarded not just as early scientific texts, but also important for the history of engineering and the history of technology.
+Other notable peripatetics include Strato, who was a tutor in the court of the Ptolemies and who devoted time to physical research, Eudemus, who edited Aristotle's works and wrote the first books on the history of science, and Demetrius of Phalerum, who governed Athens for a time and later may have helped establish the Library of Alexandria.
+
+== Hellenistic age ==

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+
+The military campaigns of Alexander the Great spread Greek thought to Egypt, Asia Minor, Persia, up to the Indus River. The resulting migration of many Greek speaking populations across these territories provided the impetus for the foundation of several seats of learning, such as those in Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamum.
+Hellenistic science differed from Greek science in at least two respects: first, it benefited from the cross-fertilization of Greek ideas with those that had developed in other non-Hellenic civilizations; secondly, to some extent, it was supported by royal patrons in the kingdoms founded by Alexander's successors. The city of Alexandria, in particular, became a major center of scientific research in the 3rd century BC. Two institutions established there during the reigns of Ptolemy I Soter (367–282 BC) and Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309–246 BC) were the Library and the Museum. Unlike Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, these institutions were officially supported by the Ptolemies, although the extent of patronage could be precarious depending on the policies of the current ruler.
+Hellenistic scholars often employed the principles developed in earlier Greek thought in their scientific investigations, such as the application of mathematics to phenomena or the deliberate collection of empirical data. The assessment of Hellenistic science, however, varies widely. At one extreme is the view of English classical scholar Cornford, who believed that "all the most important and original work was done in the three centuries from 600 to 300 BC". At the other end is the view of Italian physicist and mathematician Lucio Russo, who claims that the scientific method was actually born in the 3rd century BC, only to be largely forgotten during the Roman period and not revived again until the Renaissance.
+
+=== Technology ===
+
+A good example of the level of achievement in astronomical knowledge and engineering during the Hellenistic age can be seen in the Antikythera mechanism (150–100 BC). It is a 37-gear mechanical computer which calculated the motions of the Sun, Moon, and possibly the other five planets known to the ancients. The Antikythera mechanism included lunar and solar eclipses predicted on the basis of astronomical periods believed to have been learned from the Babylonians. The device may have been part of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology that was later, at least in part, transmitted to the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, where mechanical devices which were complex, albeit simpler than the Antikythera mechanism, were built during the Middle Ages. Fragments of a geared calendar attached to a sundial, from the fifth or sixth century Byzantine Empire, have been found; the calendar may have been used to assist in telling time. A geared calendar similar to the Byzantine device was described by the scientist al-Biruni around 1000, and a surviving 13th-century astrolabe also contains a similar clockwork device.
+
+=== Medicine ===
+
+An important school of medicine was formed in Alexandria from the late 4th century to the 2nd century BC. Beginning with Ptolemy I Soter, medical officials were allowed to cut open and examine cadavers for the purposes of learning how human bodies operated. The first use of human bodies for anatomical research occurred in the work of Herophilos (335–280 BC) and Erasistratus (c. 304 – c. 250 BC), who gained permission to perform live dissections, or vivisections, on condemned criminals in Alexandria under the auspices of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
+Herophilos developed a body of anatomical knowledge much more informed by the actual structure of the human body than previous works had been. He also reversed the longstanding notion made by Aristotle that the heart was the "seat of intelligence", arguing for the brain instead. Herophilos also wrote on the distinction between veins and arteries, and made many other accurate observations about the structure of the human body, especially the nervous system. Erasistratus differentiated between the function of the sensory and motor nerves, and linked them to the brain. He is credited with one of the first in-depth descriptions of the cerebrum and cerebellum. For their contributions, Herophilos is often called the "father of anatomy", while Erasistratus is regarded by some as the "founder of physiology".
+
+=== Mathematics ===
+
+Greek mathematics in the Hellenistic period reached a level of sophistication not matched for several centuries afterward, as much of the work represented by scholars active at this time was of a very advanced level. There is also evidence of combining mathematical knowledge with high levels of technical expertise, as found for instance in the construction of massive building projects (e.g., the Syracusia), or in Eratosthenes' (276–195 BC) measurement of the distance between the Sun and the Earth and the size of the Earth.
+Although few in number, Hellenistic mathematicians actively communicated with each other; publication consisted of passing and copying someone's work among colleagues. Among the most recognizable is the work of Euclid (325–265 BC), who presumably authored a series of books known as the Elements, a canon of geometry and elementary number theory for many centuries. Euclid's Elements served as the main textbook for the teaching of theoretical mathematics until the early 20th century.
+Archimedes (287–212 BC), a Sicilian Greek, wrote about a dozen treatises where he communicated many remarkable results, such as the sum of an infinite geometric series in Quadrature of the Parabola, an approximation to the value π in Measurement of the Circle, and a nomenclature to express very large numbers in the Sand Reckoner.
+The most characteristic product of Greek mathematics may be the theory of conic sections, which was largely developed in the Hellenistic period, primarily by Apollonius (262–190 BC). The methods used made no explicit use of algebra, nor trigonometry, the latter appearing around the time of Hipparchus (190–120 BC).
+
+=== Astronomy ===

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+
+Advances in mathematical astronomy also took place during the Hellenistic age. Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day. Aristarchus also estimated the sizes of the Sun and Moon as compared to Earth's size, and the distances to the Sun and Moon. His heliocentric model did not find many adherents in antiquity but did influence some early modern astronomers, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, who was aware of the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus.
+In the 2nd century BC, Hipparchus discovered precession, calculated the size and distance of the Moon and invented the earliest known astronomical devices such as the astrolabe. Hipparchus also created a comprehensive catalog of 1020 stars, and most of the constellations of the northern hemisphere derive from Greek astronomy. It has recently been claimed that a celestial globe based on Hipparchus's star catalog sits atop the broad shoulders of a large 2nd-century Roman statue known as the Farnese Atlas.
+
+== Roman era ==
+
+Science during the Roman Empire was concerned with systematizing knowledge gained in the preceding Hellenistic age and the knowledge from the vast areas the Romans had conquered. It was largely the work of authors active in this period that would be passed on uninterrupted to later civilizations.
+Even though science continued under Roman rule, Latin texts were mainly compilations drawing on earlier Greek work. Advanced scientific research and teaching continued to be carried on in Greek. Such Greek and Hellenistic works as survived were preserved and developed later in the Byzantine Empire and then in the Islamic world. Late Roman attempts to translate Greek writings into Latin had limited success (e.g., Boethius), and direct knowledge of most ancient Greek texts only reached western Europe from the 12th century onwards.
+
+=== Pliny ===
+Pliny the Elder published the Naturalis Historia in 77 AD, one of the most extensive compilations of the natural world which survived into the Middle Ages. Pliny did not simply list materials and objects but also recorded explanations of phenomena. Thus he is the first to correctly describe the origin of amber as being the fossilized resin of pine trees. He makes the inference from the observation of trapped insects within some amber samples.
+Pliny's work is divided neatly into the organic world of plants and animals, and the realm of inorganic matter, although there are frequent digressions in each section. He is especially interested in not just describing the occurrence of plants, animals and insects, but also their exploitation (or abuse) by man. The description of metals and minerals is particularly detailed, and valuable as being the most extensive compilation still available from the ancient world. Although much of the work was compiled by judicious use of written sources, Pliny gives an eyewitness account of gold mining in Spain, where he was stationed as an officer. Pliny is especially significant because he provides full bibliographic details of the earlier authors and their works he uses and consults. Because his encyclopaedia survived the Dark Ages, we know of these lost works, even if the texts themselves have disappeared. The book was one of the first to be printed in 1489, and became a standard reference work for Renaissance scholars, as well as an inspiration for the development of a scientific and rational approach to the world.
+
+=== Hero ===
+Hero of Alexandria was a Greco-Egyptian mathematician and engineer who is often considered to be the greatest experimenter of antiquity. Among his most famous inventions was a windwheel, constituting the earliest instance of wind harnessing on land, and a well-recognized description of a steam-powered device called an aeolipile, which was the first-recorded steam engine.
+
+=== Galen ===
+The greatest medical practitioner and philosopher of this era was Galen, active in the 2nd century AD. Around 100 of his works survive—the most for any ancient Greek author—and fill 22 volumes of modern text. Galen was born in the ancient Greek city of Pergamon (now in Turkey), the son of a successful architect who gave him a liberal education. Galen was instructed in all major philosophical schools (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism) until his father, moved by a dream of Asclepius, decided he should study medicine. After his father's death, Galen traveled widely searching for the best doctors in Smyrna, Corinth, and finally Alexandria.
+Galen compiled much of the knowledge obtained by his predecessors, and furthered the inquiry into the function of organs by performing dissections and vivisections on Barbary apes, oxen, pigs, and other animals. In 158 AD, Galen served as chief physician to the gladiators in his native Pergamon, and was able to study all kinds of wounds without performing any actual human dissection. It was through his experiments, however, that Galen was able to overturn many long-held beliefs, such as the theory that the arteries contained air which carried it to all parts of the body from the heart and the lungs. This belief was based originally on the arteries of dead animals, which appeared to be empty. Galen was able to demonstrate that living arteries contain blood, but his error, which became the established medical orthodoxy for centuries, was to assume that the blood goes back and forth from the heart in an ebb-and-flow motion.
+Anatomy was a prominent part of Galen's medical education and was a major source of interest throughout his life. He wrote two great anatomical works, On anatomical procedure and On the uses of the parts of the body of man. The information in these tracts became the foundation of authority for all medical writers and physicians for the next 1300 years until they were challenged by Vesalius and Harvey in the 16th century.
+
+=== Ptolemy ===

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+---
+title: "Science in classical antiquity"
+chunk: 6/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_classical_antiquity"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:44.265759+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100–170 AD), living in or around Alexandria, carried out a scientific program centered on the writing of about a dozen books on astronomy, astrology, cartography, harmonics, and optics. Despite their severe style and high technicality, a great deal of them have survived, in some cases the sole remnants of their kind of writing from antiquity. Two major themes that run through Ptolemy's works are mathematical modelling of physical phenomena and methods of visual representation of physical reality.
+Ptolemy's research program involved a combination of theoretical analysis with empirical considerations seen, for instance, in his systematized study of astronomy. Ptolemy's Mathēmatikē Syntaxis (Ancient Greek: Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις), better known as the Almagest, sought to improve on the work of his predecessors by building astronomy not only upon a secure mathematical basis but also by demonstrating the relationship between astronomical observations and the resulting astronomical theory. In his Planetary Hypotheses, Ptolemy describes in detail physical representations of his mathematical models found in the Almagest, presumably for didactic purposes. Likewise, the Geography was concerned with the drawing of accurate maps using astronomical information, at least in principle. Apart from astronomy, both the Harmonics and the Optics contain (in addition to mathematical analyses of sound and sight, respectively) instructions on how to construct and use experimental instruments to corroborate theory.
+In retrospect, it is apparent that Ptolemy adjusted some reported measurements to fit his (incorrect) assumption that the angle of refraction is proportional to the angle of incidence.
+Ptolemy's thoroughness and his preoccupation with ease of data presentation (for example, in his widespread use of tables) virtually guaranteed that earlier work on these subjects be neglected or considered obsolete, to the extent that almost nothing remains of the works Ptolemy often refers. His astronomical work in particular defined the method and subject matter of future research for centuries, and the Ptolemaic system became the dominant model for the motions of the heavens until the seventeenth century.
+
+== See also ==
+Forensics in antiquity
+Protoscience
+Roman technology
+Obsolete scientific theories
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==