Science in classical antiquity
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From Antiquity up to the time of the Scientific Revolution, inquiry into the workings of the universe was known as natural philosophy, but this included fields of study which today have been divorced from science. The ancient peoples who are considered the first scientists may have thought of themselves as natural philosophers. In other cases, systematic learning about the natural world was a direct outgrowth of religion, often as a project of a particular religious community. An account of the development of (natural) philosophy from ancient times until recent times can be found in Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy.
One important feature of "pre-scientific" natural philosophy is a reluctance to experiment. For example, Aristotle is one of the most prolific natural philosophers of Antiquity. He made countless observations of nature, especially the habits and attributes of plants and animals in the world around him, which he devoted considerable attention to categorizing. He also made many observations about the large-scale workings of the universe, which led to his development of a comprehensive theory of physics in his missives of the same name. (See Physics (Aristotle).)
But Aristotle did not make predictions in the way that the current scientific process requires. His approach was to observe nature, to use deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning to explain everything, and to use his natural observations to illustrate his explanations. For example, he developed a version of the classical theory of the elements (earth, water, fire, air, and aether). In his theory, the heavier elements (earth, water) had a natural tendency to move toward the center of the universe (what we would now call the center of the Earth), and the lighter elements a natural tendency to move away from it. (Since the celestial bodies - e.g. planets and stars - were seen to move in circles, he concluded that they must be made of another, fifth, element, which he called Aether.)
Aristotle could point to the falling stone, rising flames, or pouring water to illustrate his theory. His laws of motion emphasized the common observation that friction was an omnipresent phenomenon - that any body in motion would, unless acted upon, come to rest. He also proposed that heavier objects fall faster, and that voids were impossible.
The development of experiment had to wait until the 7th and 8th centuries when it was developed by Islamic scientists. These scholars also developed the practices of citation and peer review, without which modern science would be unthinkable.[citation needed] The experimental method was introduced to the West by Roger Bacon (who had read widely amongst Arabic/Islamic writers). However, Bacon's work remained uninfluential in the Western world until the scientific revolution, when his work was rediscovered, creating a profound shift in Western thought away from abstract thought and towards empirical research.
For example, Galileo (1638) investigated the motion of falling bodies, and found that heavier bodies, in fact, do not always fall faster. These ideas were not new, but what was new was that Galileo attempted to demonstrate the correctness of his findings via experiment. The experimental results of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were formalized in Newton's laws of motion. Newton would state that inertia is an inherent property of mass: a moving body will stay in motion unless acted upon. Unlike Aristotle's views, Newton would state that friction is not an inherent property of objects; friction seems omnipresent because we live in an environment filled with fluids like air and water, which maintain continual contact with all objects immersed in them.
Other revolutionary investigations of the period produced the vacuum, a void of the sort that Aristotle thought impossible. Today, one of the results of quantum mechanics is the notion that even vacuum possesses properties (see quantum foam) which were unsuspected during the time of the Scientific Revolution.