Early Modern (15th-18th Century)

Copper was the first metal used by man in any quantity. The earliest workers in copper soon found that it could be easily hammered into sheets and the sheets in turn worked into shapes which became more complex as their skill increased. After the introduction of bronze, a wide range of castings also became possible. Many of the illustrations on this site serve to show man's progress as a metal-worker, culminating in the priceless inheritance of the Renaissance craftsmen. But copper and its principal alloys, bronze and brass, have always been more than a means of decorative embellishment. Although iron became the basic metal of every Western civilization from Rome onwards it was the copper metals which were used when a combination of strength and durability was required. The ability to resist corrosion ensured that copper, bronze and brass remained as functional as well as decorative materials during the Middle Ages and the successive centuries through the Industrial Revolution and on to the present day.

Hydroponics, the growing of plants without soil, has developed from the findings of experiments carried out to determine what substances make plants grow and the composition of plants. Such work on plant constituents dates back as early as the 1600s. However, plants were being grown in a soilless culture far earlier than this. Hydroponics is at least as ancient as the pyramids. A primitive form has been carried on in Kashmir for centuries.
The process of hydroponics growing in our oceans goes back to about the time the earth was created. Hydroponic growing preceded soil growing. But as a farming tool, many believe it started in the ancient city of Babylon with it's famous hanging gardens, which are listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and was probably one of the first successful attempts to grow plants hydroponically.

This web site is devoted to the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, which is part of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The Institute consists of two distinct Sections: the History of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences Section and the Foundations of Physics Section, both located in De Uithof at the edge of the city of Utrecht.

In the interplay between quantitative observation and theoretical construction that characterizes the development of modern science, we have seen that Brahe was the master of the first but was deficient in the second. The next great development in the history of astronomy was the theoretical intuition of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a German who went to Prague to become Brahe's assistant.

19.II.1473
Nicolaus Copernicus born at Torun, Poland
1483
Copernicus’ father dies
1489
Lukasz Watzenrode, Copernicus’ maternal uncle and guardian, elected Bishop of Warmia.
1491
Nicolaus Copernicus leaves the parish school of St. John, Torun for the University in Kraków.
1491-1495
Period of studies at the University in Krakow.
1496
Copernicus begins Law studies at Bologna.
1497
Copernicus join the Chapter of Warmia, holding the post of Canon of Frombork in absentia through his vicars. His name is entered into the students’ corporation book.

If science has a beginning date, it must be 1632 when the Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei, published his book, Dialogue on the Two Systems of the World [Note 1] All the previous work, all the observations, theory, and fighting against dogmatic concepts were brought together by Galileo.

The Greeks, by and large, had been satisfied to accept the "obvious" facts of nature as starting points for their reasoning. Aristotle was quite content to use reason to argue that the heavier stone would fall faster than the lighter stone because it "wanted" to be in its proper place more than the lighter stone. Given his organic reasoning, it would not have occurred to him to test the "obvious." To the Greeks, experimentation seemed irrelevant. It interfered with and detracted from the beauty of pure deduction. Besides, if an experiment disagreed with a deduction, could one be certain that the experiment was correct? Was it likely that the imperfect world of reality would agree completely with the perfect world of abstract ideas; and if it did not, ought one to adjust the perfect to the demands of the imperfect? To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

In geological terms, Long Island was born yesterday.
The oversize sandbar where we live is only the latest, temporary incarnation of a corner of the world that has been continuously reshaped by colliding continents, crumbling mountains, shifting sea level, pounding waves and titanic glaciers. And though Long Island is brand new by the time scale of history, the way we live upon it is profoundly influenced by the remarkable series of transformations that occurred here over hundreds of millions of years.

Henri Becquerel was born into a family of scientists. His grandfather had made important contributions in the field of electrochemistry while his father had investigated the phenomena of fluorescence and phosphorescence. Becquerel not only inherited their interest in science, he also inherited the minerals and compounds studied by his father. And so, upon learning how Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X rays by observing the fluorescence they produced, Becquerel had a ready source of fluorescent materials with which to pursue his own investigations of these mysterious rays. The material Becquerel chose to work with was a double sulfate of uranium and potassium which he exposed to sunlight and placed on photographic plates wrapped in black paper. When developed, the plates revealed an image of the uranium crystals

Everything's relative. Speed, mass, space and time are all subjective. Nor are age, motion or the wanderings of the planets measures that humans can agree on anymore; they can be judged only by the whim of the observer. Light has weight. Space has curves. And coiled within a pound of matter, any matter, is the explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT. We know all this, we are set adrift in this way at the end of the 20th century, because of Albert Einstein.

The transitional period falls between the pre 17th century alchemy and the 18th century chemistry. The climax of this period is probably with the English scientist Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727) and his book "Principia Mathematica" (1687). In this book, Newton introduced three laws of motion which served well for over two centuries in mechanical sciences. He also expanded his theories of gravitation and provided some useful explanations of the work of the Italian Scientist Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) who in the 1590's studied the behavior of falling bodies.