Origin of science

Science had its origin in some distant era when people began to show desire to know about their environment and to record what they saw. In time, studies of these observations led to the idea that nature is knowable, that it operates according to "laws". The actual birth of science took place in prehistoric times, probably in Egypt and Babylonia, more than 2,000 years before our era.

But true progress in science did not begin until about the sixth century before our era, when the Greek civilization began to flourish. The next 500 years was the age of the great philosophers of antiquity — Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes, and others.

Archimedes discovered some of the basic laws governing mechanisms. To Archimedes we owe the first application of mathematics to the description of nature. He was very far in advance of his time.

In the period from the Greeks to the Renaissance few contributions were made to the development of science. First in importance among the scientific achievements of the Renaissance was the idea that the sun, rather than the earth, is the centre of our system of sun, moon, and planets. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the prevailing idea was that of an earth-centred universe, as described by Ptolemy.

The Polish astronomer N. Copernicus assumed that the earth is merely one of the planets and that all of them moved about the sun. It is hard now to understand the courage required to advance an idea of this nature because of the great wave of opposition which confronted Copernicus.

But only three centuries ago did man adopt the scientific method of studying his environment. After this the development of civilization has become more rapid. The advance of all the natural sciences has been almost simultaneous: in fact, many of the prominent scientists were working in more than one field of knowledge.

2. Find in the text English equivalents to the following words and word combinations:

навколишнє середовище, записувати, спостереження, Єгипет, цивілізація, процвітати, античність, відкривати, внесок, наукові досягнення, розповсюдження, ідея, заявити, перейняти, науковий метод, галузь знань.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-25