Explain why it is important to know the history of science.around 500 words
Answers
The history of science is the study of the development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the natural sciences andsocial sciences. (The history of the arts and humanities is termed as the history of scholarship.) Science is a body of empirical,theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, often draws on the historical methods of bothintellectual history and social history.
The English word scientist is relatively recent—first coined by William Whewell in the 19th century. Previously, people investigating nature called themselves natural philosophers. While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described sinceclassical antiquity (for example, by Thales, Aristotle, and others), and scientific methods have been employed since the Middle Ages(for example, by Ibn al-Haytham, and Roger Bacon), the dawn of modern science is often traced back to the early modern periodand in particular to the scientific revolution that took place in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Scientific methods are considered to be so fundamental to modern science that some consider earlier inquiries into nature to be pre-scientific.