Ancient astronomy.
Ancient Egyptian astronomy is evident in monuments like the
ceiling of Senemut's tomb from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.
Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences. The
earliest civilizations dating back to beyond 3000 BCE, such as the Sumerians,
ancient Egyptians, and the Indus Valley Civilization, all had a predictive
knowledge and a basic understanding of the motions of the Sun, Moon, and stars.
The stars and planets were often a target of worship, believed to represent
their gods. While the explanations for these phenomena were often unscientific
and lacking in evidence, these early observations laid the foundation for later
astronomy.
According to Asger Aaboe, the origins of Western astronomy
can be found in Mesopotamia, and all Western efforts in the exact sciences are
descended from late Babylonian astronomy. Egyptian astronomers left monuments
showing knowledge of the constellations and the motions of the celestial
bodies, while Greek poet Homer wrote of various celestial objects in his Iliad
and Odyssey; later Greek astronomers provided names, which are still used
today, for most constellations visible from the northern hemisphere.
Natural philosophy
Natural philosophy
Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the
Archaic period, (650 BCE – 480 BCE), when pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales
rejected non-naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed
that every event had a natural cause. They proposed ideas verified by reason
and observation, and many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment;
for example, atomism was found to be correct approximately 2000 years after it
was first proposed by Leucippus and his pupil Democritus.
Physics in the medieval Islamic world
Physics in the
medieval Islamic world
The basic way a pinhole camera works
Islamic scholarship had inherited Aristotelian physics from
the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further, especially
placing emphasis on observation and a priori reasoning, developing early forms
of the scientific method.
The most notable innovations were in the field of optics and
vision, which came from the works of many scientists like Ibn Sahl, Al-Kindi,
Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Farisi and Avicenna. The most notable work was The Book of
Optics (also known as Kitāb al-Manāẓir), written by Ibn Al-Haitham, in which he
was not only the first to disprove the ancient Greek idea about vision, but
also came up with a new theory. In the book, he was also the first to study the
phenomenon of the pinhole camera and delved further into the way the eye itself
works. Using dissections and the knowledge of previous scholars, he was able to
begin to explain how light enters the eye, is focused, and is projected to the
back of the eye: and built then the world's first camera obscura hundreds of
years before the modern development of photography.
Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen) drawing
Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965 - c. 1040), the pioneer of optics
The seven-volume Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manathir) hugely
influenced thinking across disciplines from the theory of visual perception to
the nature of perspective in medieval art, in both the East and the West, for
more than 600 years. Many later European scholars and fellow polymaths, from
Robert Grosseteste and Leonardo da Vinci to René Descartes, Johannes Kepler and
Isaac Newton, were in his debt. Indeed, the influence of Ibn al-Haytham's
Optics ranks alongside that of Newton's work of the same title, published 700
years later.
The translation of The Book of Optics had a huge impact on
Europe. From it, later European scholars were able to build the same devices as
what Ibn al-Haytham did, and understand the way light works. From this, such
important things as eyeglasses, magnifying glasses, telescopes, and cameras
were developed.
Classical physics
Classical physics
Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), whose laws of motion and
universal gravitation were major milestones in classical physics
Physics became a separate science when early modern
Europeans used experimental and quantitative methods to discover what are now
considered to be the laws of physics.[18][page needed]
Major developments in this period include the replacement of
the geocentric model of the solar system with the heliocentric Copernican
model, the laws governing the motion of planetary bodies determined by Johannes
Kepler between 1609 and 1619, pioneering work on telescopes and observational
astronomy by Galileo Galilei in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and Isaac Newton's
discovery and unification of the laws of motion and universal gravitation that
would come to bear his name.[19] Newton also developed calculus,[c] the
mathematical study of change, which provided new mathematical methods for
solving physical problems.[20]
The discovery of new laws in thermodynamics, chemistry, and
electromagnetics resulted from greater research efforts during the Industrial
Revolution as energy needs increased. The laws comprising classical physics
remain very widely used for objects on everyday scales travelling at
non-relativistic speeds, since they provide a very close approximation in such
situations, and theories such as quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity
simplify to their classical equivalents at such scales. However, inaccuracies
in classical mechanics for very small objects and very high velocities led to
the development of modern physics in the 20th century.
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