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Science and technology

118 events 2 sources c. 10000 BCE to c. 1975 updated 23 Jul 2026, 01:01

The history of scientific knowledge, machines, computation, medicine, and invention.

The history of scientific knowledge, machines, computation, medicine, and invention.

Figures Alexander FlemingAlexander Graham BellAlfred NobelArchimedesAristotleChristiaan HuygensDouglas EngelbartEli WhitneyFrancis BaconFrancis CrickGeorge StephensonGordon Moore

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this part of How technology remade the world this parallel Forensic science: from fingerprints to junk science this parallel The history of science this parallel DARPA, Silicon Valley, and the security state

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part of this How technology remade the world part of this NASA and the space age part of this The pillars of modern power part of this Babylonian astronomy and the birth of the zodiac part of this Forensic science: from fingerprints to junk science part of this The history of mathematics part of this The history of science

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    The alphabet

    also in How technology remade the world

    Proto Sinaitic script reduced writing to a small set of signs for sounds rather than hundreds of symbols. This simple alphabet made literacy far easier to learn.

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    Egyptian medicine and the Edwin Smith papyrus

    also in The history of science

    The surviving papyrus, copied from a much older text, treats injuries by observation and prognosis rather than by magic alone. It shows early empirical medicine sitting side by side with spells and ritual. Historians caution against reading it as fully rational science; healing in Egypt mixed careful observation with religion.

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    Babylonian astronomers record the sky as numbers

    also in The history of science

    Scribes in Mesopotamia kept centuries of records of the moon, planets, and eclipses on clay tablets, and reduced their motions to arithmetic rules. This was proto-science, not modern science: the goal was omens and calendars, not physical laws. Yet the data and mathematical methods later fed directly into Greek astronomy.

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    Thales and the first natural philosophers

    also in The history of science

    Thales and the Milesian thinkers began to explain the world through natural causes rather than the acts of gods, asking what everything was made of. The famous story that Thales predicted a solar eclipse is likely later legend. The lasting shift was the idea that nature follows understandable principles.

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    Hippocratic medicine separates disease from the divine

    also in The history of science

    The texts gathered under the name of Hippocrates argued that illness had natural causes and could be studied through observation of the patient. The works were written by many hands over generations, not one man. Their theory of four humors was wrong, but the method of careful bedside observation endured.

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    Aristotle's physics, four elements, and Earth at the center

    also in The history of science

    Aristotle built a vast system in which everything on Earth was made of earth, water, air, and fire, and the heavens turned around a motionless Earth. His work was a huge advance in systematic reasoning and biology, based on real observation of animals. It also fixed several wrong ideas, like geocentrism and objects needing a constant push to move, that would take almost two thousand years to overturn.

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    The Roman aqueduct

    also in How technology remade the world

    Rome built long gravity fed channels to carry fresh water into cities, starting with the Aqua Appia. Aqueducts supplied baths, fountains and homes and supported large urban populations.

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    Eratosthenes measures the size of the Earth

    also in The history of science

    Using the different noon shadows cast at Alexandria and Syene, Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference by simple geometry and got close to the true value. The exact figure depends on the length of his units, which we cannot pin down. The point stands: Greek science already knew the Earth was a globe and roughly how big.

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    Roman concrete

    also in How technology remade the world

    Romans mixed volcanic ash, lime and water to make a durable concrete that could set underwater. It made possible domes, harbors and structures like the Pantheon that still stand.

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    Paper

    also in How technology remade the world

    The official Cai Lun is credited with refining papermaking from pulped fibers into cheap writing sheets. Paper spread slowly westward and became the main surface for writing and printing.

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    Ptolemy's Almagest codifies the geocentric universe

    also in The history of science

    Ptolemy gathered Greek astronomy into a mathematical model that predicted planetary positions using circles upon circles. It was geocentric and, in hindsight, wrong about the structure of the cosmos. But it worked well enough to guide navigation and calendars for over a thousand years, which is why it was so hard to displace.

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    The House of Wisdom gathers the world's learning in Baghdad

    also in The history of science

    Under Abbasid patronage, scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian, and Indian works into Arabic and pushed them forward. The picture of a single grand library called the House of Wisdom is partly a modern simplification of a broader translation movement. Either way, this era preserved and advanced knowledge that Europe had largely lost.

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    Gunpowder

    also in How technology remade the world

    Chinese alchemists mixed saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur into an explosive powder. Gunpowder led to firearms and cannon and changed warfare worldwide.

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    Ibn al-Haytham and the experimental study of light

    also in The history of science

    In his Book of Optics, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) showed that we see because light reflects from objects into the eye, overturning older Greek theories. He insisted on testing ideas against controlled observation, and many historians credit him as an early champion of the experimental method. The claim that he invented the scientific method single-handed is an overstatement, but his stress on evidence over authority was real and influential.

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    Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine

    also in Curriculum, programming, and propaganda, The history of science

    Ibn Sina (Avicenna) organized Greek and Islamic medicine into a single encyclopedic work that became a standard text in Europe and the Islamic world for centuries. It combined real clinical insight with the inherited humoral theory that was later abandoned. Its long reign shows both the strength and the danger of a single authoritative textbook.

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    Eyeglasses

    also in How technology remade the world

    Unknown craftsmen near Pisa mounted two convex lenses in a frame to correct failing eyesight. Eyeglasses extended the working lives of scholars and artisans.

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    The mechanical clock

    also in How technology remade the world

    European tower clocks using a verge escapement measured time with gears and a swinging bar instead of water. Mechanical clocks brought regular hours to towns and reshaped how people organized work and life.

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    Copernicus places the sun at the center

    also in The history of science

    In On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published the year he died, Copernicus put the sun at the center and set the Earth in motion. His system still used circular orbits and was not obviously more accurate than Ptolemy's at first. Its real power was conceptual: it made the sun-centered cosmos a serious scientific proposal.

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    Vesalius corrects the anatomy of the human body

    also in The history of science

    Vesalius published On the Fabric of the Human Body based on his own dissections, correcting many of Galen's long-accepted errors. His insistence on looking at the body directly, rather than trusting ancient texts, marked a turn toward evidence in medicine. The lavish illustrations spread the new anatomy across Europe.

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    Tycho Brahe builds the best pre-telescope observatory

    also in The history of science

    Tycho Brahe gathered decades of extremely precise naked-eye measurements of the planets and stars from his observatory at Uraniborg. He kept the Earth at the center in his own hybrid model, so he was not a Copernican. But his data, more accurate than anything before, became the raw material for a revolution he did not intend.

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    The telescope

    also in How technology remade the world

    Hans Lippershey filed for a patent on a device that made distant objects look nearer. Turned to the sky by Galileo, the telescope transformed astronomy and our view of the cosmos.

    • This new system began with the first Puritan church at Salem, organized in 1629 by the so-called “Salem Procedure.”
      Dumbing Us Down , p. 106-113
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    Kepler's laws break the spell of the perfect circle

    also in The history of science

    Working from Tycho's data, Kepler found that planets move in ellipses, not circles, and sweep out equal areas in equal times. His third law, linking orbital period to distance, followed in 1619. He reached these results through years of grinding calculation, and mixed them with mystical ideas about cosmic harmony that historians are careful not to airbrush out.

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    Galileo turns the telescope on the heavens

    also in The history of science

    In Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo reported moons circling Jupiter, mountains on the moon, and countless unseen stars, all through a telescope he did not invent but greatly improved. These sights were hard to square with a perfect, Earth-centered heaven. He became the loudest public voice for the Copernican system.

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    Francis Bacon argues for knowledge from experiment

    also in The history of science

    In Novum Organum, Bacon called for building knowledge from careful observation and experiment rather than from ancient authority. He was a promoter and organizer of method more than a working scientist, and did little experimenting himself. His vision of collective, evidence-based inquiry helped inspire later scientific societies.

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    The trial of Galileo

    also in The history of science

    The Roman Inquisition tried Galileo for defending the sun-centered system and forced him to recant, sentencing him to house arrest. The clash was tangled up in Church politics, personality, and how he argued, not simply science against religion. It became a lasting symbol of the cost of challenging authority, and later a caution against reading all of history as that one story.

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    Descartes and reason as the path to knowledge

    also in The history of science

    In the Discourse on Method, Descartes argued for doubting everything and rebuilding knowledge on clear reasoning and mathematics. His mechanical picture of nature as matter in motion shaped how the next generation thought. Some of his specific physics was wrong, but his push for systematic method left a deep mark.

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    Newton's Principia unifies the heavens and the Earth

    also in The history of science

    In the Principia, Newton set out three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation that governed both falling apples and orbiting planets. It fused Kepler's and Galileo's findings into one mathematical system and became the model of what a scientific theory could be. The tidy apple story is mostly legend; the work rested on years of hard mathematics and drew on many predecessors.

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    Einstein's special relativity

    also in The history of science

    In his miracle year, Einstein argued that the speed of light is constant for all observers, so space and time stretch and shrink with motion. The same year he explained the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. He built on work by Lorentz and Poincare, who had some of the pieces but not the full reinterpretation.

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    Einstein's general relativity reshapes gravity

    also in The history of science

    Einstein recast gravity not as a force but as the bending of space and time by mass and energy. The theory predicted that starlight would bend around the sun, confirmed by an eclipse expedition in 1919 that made him famous overnight. It remains our best description of gravity and the large-scale universe.

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    Quantum mechanics remakes the rules of matter

    also in The history of science

    In the mid-1920s Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, Dirac, and others built quantum mechanics, in which particles behave as probabilities rather than certainties. It was the work of many hands over a few intense years, not a single breakthrough. Its predictions are astonishingly accurate, yet physicists still argue about what it really means.

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    Penicillin and antibiotics

    also in How technology remade the world, Infrastructure and logistics

    Alexander Fleming noticed that a mold killed bacteria, leading to penicillin, the first true antibiotic. Antibiotics made once fatal infections curable and transformed medicine.

    • The most impressive statistic in French's study was a correlation coefficient of .82, which expressed the relationship between the composite rating of teaching ability and the measures of group attention during recitation periods.
      Life in Classrooms
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    Lemaitre and Hubble find an expanding universe

    also in The history of science

    Edwin Hubble's measurements showed that distant galaxies are rushing away from us, so the universe is expanding. The Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre had derived the expansion and proposed a primeval atom two years earlier, an idea that grew into the Big Bang. The name Big Bang was actually coined later by a skeptic, Fred Hoyle, as a jab.

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    Popper argues that science must be falsifiable

    also in The history of science

    Karl Popper argued that a theory is scientific only if it makes predictions that could in principle be proven wrong. This drew a line between science and claims that explain everything and risk nothing. Later philosophers, including Kuhn, argued that real science rarely works as cleanly as Popper's rule suggests.

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    The transistor

    also in 1947: the postwar order is built, How technology remade the world, Infrastructure and logistics

    Researchers at Bell Labs built the first working transistor, a tiny solid state switch and amplifier. Transistors replaced bulky vacuum tubes and are the basic building block of all modern electronics.

    • This technique, to which Bloom gave the term stimulated recall, consisted of making sound recordings of a class session and playing them back to the students within a period of two days from the actual event.
      Life in Classrooms
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    The double helix and the contested credit of Rosalind Franklin

    also in The history of science

    Watson and Crick worked out that DNA is a double helix, revealing how genetic information is copied and passed on. Their model depended heavily on Rosalind Franklin's X-ray images, shown to them without her clear consent, and she received little credit at the time. She had died before the 1962 Nobel Prize, which does not go to the dead, and the fairness of the credit is still debated.

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    Kuhn and the idea of scientific revolutions

    also in The history of science

    Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not just accumulate facts but lurches between paradigms, with old frameworks replaced in crises. His book made paradigm shift a household phrase and challenged the tidy story of steady progress. Critics warned his view could be pushed too far, into treating all theories as equally valid, which he did not intend.

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    Plate tectonics vindicates a drifting Earth

    also in The history of science

    Alfred Wegener had proposed drifting continents back in 1912, but was dismissed for lacking a mechanism. In the 1960s, seafloor spreading and magnetic stripes on the ocean floor supplied the missing engine, and plate tectonics became the framework of modern geology. It is a clear case of a rejected idea proven right once the evidence caught up.

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    Peer review and science as a self-correcting process

    also in The history of science

    Formal peer review, where experts vet a paper before publication, became standard in most journals only in the middle of the twentieth century, later than many assume. It is a filter, not a guarantee of truth, and it misses errors and fraud. The deeper strength of science is that findings must survive repeated testing by others, so it corrects itself over time rather than resting on fixed truths.

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    The microprocessor

    also in 1971: the dollar unchained, How technology remade the world, Infrastructure and logistics

    Intel released the 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, putting a computer's processing on a single chip. Cheap microprocessors made personal computers, phones and countless devices possible.

    • doing school work for the rewards it will bring in the form of good grades and teacher approval
      Life in Classrooms
    • Therefore, as perceived by their administrative superiors, these teachers comprise the top 5 or 10 percent of the instructional staff. The sample was drawn chiefly from suburban communities surrounding Chicago.
      Life in Classrooms
    • In a sense he is working for the school and against it at the same time.
      Life in Classrooms
    • The result, it is claimed, will be the transformation of teaching from an art to a science.
      Life in Classrooms
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    Skylab, America's first space station, reaches orbit damaged

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    NASA launches Skylab, the first American space station, on the last flight of a Saturn V rocket. During ascent the micrometeoroid and thermal shield tore away, ripping off one main solar wing and jamming the other, which left the station overheating and short of power. The orbital workshop reached orbit but could not be occupied until it was repaired.

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    Robert Metcalfe describes Ethernet at Xerox PARC

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Robert Metcalfe circulated a memo at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center laying out a scheme to link computers over a shared cable, which he named Ethernet. Working with David Boggs, he built the system to connect the lab's Alto workstations to a laser printer. Ethernet became the dominant standard for wired local area networks.

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    Skylab's first crew saves the crippled station

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Astronauts Charles Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joseph Kerwin fly to Skylab and rescue it in orbit. They deployed a parasol sunshade to cool the overheated workshop and freed the jammed solar wing during a spacewalk, restoring power. The crew spent 28 days aboard, then a record for human spaceflight, proving that astronauts could repair large structures in space.

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    Cosmic gamma-ray bursts are revealed to science

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Scientists at Los Alamos publish the discovery of gamma-ray bursts, brief and powerful flashes of gamma rays from deep space. The bursts had been recorded years earlier by the Vela satellites, which were built to watch for secret nuclear weapon tests. The finding opened a new field of high-energy astrophysics whose origin stayed a mystery for decades.

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    CERN's Gargamelle experiment finds weak neutral currents

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Physicists working with the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN report the first evidence of weak neutral currents, a form of the weak nuclear force that leaves particles unchanged in charge. The result confirmed a central prediction of the emerging electroweak theory of Glashow, Weinberg and Salam. It was a milestone in building the Standard Model of particle physics.

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    Skylab 4 crew sets an 84-day endurance record

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue launch on the third and final crewed Skylab mission. They stayed in orbit for 84 days, a human spaceflight duration record that stood for years, and studied the Sun and the newly found Comet Kohoutek. The mission also saw the crew push back against an overloaded schedule set by ground control.

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    Cohen and Boyer create the first recombinant DNA organism

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Stanley Cohen of Stanford and Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco report splicing genes from one organism into a bacterial plasmid that then replicated in E. coli. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the work showed genes could be cut, joined and cloned at will. It launched genetic engineering and the biotechnology industry.

  113. new

    Pioneer 10 makes the first flyby of Jupiter

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Pioneer 10 becomes the first spacecraft to fly past Jupiter, passing about 130,000 kilometres above the cloud tops. It sent back the first close-up images of the giant planet and measured its intense radiation belts, proving a probe could survive them. The mission was run from NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

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    Cerf and Kahn design TCP for internetworking

    also in 1973: the postwar order breaks

    Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn worked out the Transmission Control Program, a way to join separate packet networks into one network of networks. The design let different networks pass data through common gateways without knowing each other's internals. This work became the foundation of the modern Internet's TCP/IP protocols.

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    The Standard Model and the Higgs boson

    also in The history of science

    Through the 1960s and 1970s physicists assembled the Standard Model, describing the known particles and three of the four fundamental forces. Its final missing piece, the Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 and detected at CERN in 2012. The model is our most tested theory, yet it leaves out gravity and dark matter, so the work is unfinished.

Further reading

Change log

20 changes

  1. Linked from "The history of science" as part of in this story

  2. Linked from "The history of mathematics" as part of in this story

  3. Linked from "NASA and the space age" as part of in this story

  4. Linked from "How technology remade the world" as part of in this story

  5. Linked from "Forensic science: from fingerprints to junk science" as part of in this story

  6. Linked from "Babylonian astronomy and the birth of the zodiac" as part of in this story

  7. Linked to "Forensic science: from fingerprints to junk science" as parallel in this story

  8. Linked to "DARPA, Silicon Valley, and the security state" as parallel in this story

  9. Linked to "The history of science" as parallel in this story

  10. Linked to "How technology remade the world" as part of in this story

  11. Linked from "The pillars of modern power" as part of in this story

  12. Added "The personal computer"

  13. Added "The Standard Model and the Higgs boson"

  14. Added "The Bosphorus Bridge opens linking Europe and Asia"

  15. Added "Construction begins on the CN Tower in Toronto"

  16. Added "The Sears Tower tops out as the world's tallest building"

  17. Added "The World Trade Center towers open in New York"

  18. Added "Martin Cooper places the first handheld mobile phone call"

  19. Added "Community Memory opens the first public computer bulletin board"

  20. Added "France's Micral N ships as an early microcomputer"

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