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This
Scientific Age
Throughout
history, science has played an important and, often
controversial, role in defining how people view themselves and
their understanding of the world around them. Scientific
advances do not stand alone in a vacuum. Instead they often
lead to important social, political, and economic changes that
shape the world and our place in it. Advances that we now take
for granted; the idea that the world is round, for example;
were once earth shattering ideas that were neither quickly nor
easily accepted by the majority of people. In fact, many
scientists became martyrs because the advances they proposed
were so revolutionary as to be contrary to commonly accepted
ideas at the time. The Scientific Revolution (late 16th to
18th centuries) marks an important shift in our thinking based
on several scientific advances in fields like astronomy,
biology, chemistry, geography, human anatomy, and physics,
among others. Many important advances also occurred before the
Scientific Revolution. For example, the ancient Mesopotamians
identified several concepts; like the seven day week; that we
still use today. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates
established medicine as a professional field distinct from
others, and ancient Greek mathematicians made huge strides in
geometry (Euclidian geometry and the Pythagorean Theorem, for
example). However, what sets these early important advances
apart from those following the Scientific Revolution is that
these ancient advances were made by thinkers who considered
themselves natural philosophers, recording and observing
natural phenomena, rather than scientists who seek to explain
and predict such phenomena based on empirical evidence and
experiments that can be repeated and independently verified.
What can be verified is that
in the U
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2008
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