INTRODUCTION

The scientific study of the world has its roots in Mesopotamia. Following the invention of agriculture and writing, people had the time to devote to study and the means to pass the results of those studies on to the next generation. Early science was inspired by the wonder of the night sky. From the fourth millennium BCE, Sumerian priests studied the stars, recording their results on clay tablets. They did not leave records of their methods, but a tablet dating from 1800 BCE shows knowledge of the properties of right-angled triangles.

Ancient Greece

The ancient Greeks did not see science as a separate subject from philosophy, but the first figure whose work is recognizably scientific is probably Thales of Miletus, of whom Plato said that he spent so much time dreaming and looking at the stars that he once fell into a well. Possibly using data from earlier Babylonians, in 585 BCE, Thales predicted a solar eclipse, demonstrating the power of a scientific approach.

  Ancient Greece was not a single country, but rather a loose collection of city states. Miletus (now in Turkey) was the birthplace of several noted philosophers. Many other early Greek philosophers studied in Athens. Here, Aristotle was an astute observer, but he did not carry out experiments; he believed that, if he could bring together enough clever men, the truth would emerge. The engineer Archimedes, who lived at Syracuse on the island of Sicily, explored the properties of fluids. A new centre of learning developed at Alexandria, founded at the mouth of the Nile by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. Here Eratosthenes measured the size of Earth, Ctesibius made accurate clocks, and Hero invented the steam engine. Meanwhile, the librarians in Alexandria collected the best books they could find to build up the best library in the world, which was burned down when Romans and Christians took over the city.

Science in Asia

Science flourished independently in China. The Chinese invented gunpowder – and with it fireworks, rockets, and guns – and made bellows for working metal. They invented the first seismograph and the first compass. In 1054 CE, Chinese astronomers observed a supernova, which was identified as the Crab Nebula in 1731.

  Some of the most advanced technology in the first millennium CE, including the spinning wheel, was developed in India, and Chinese missions were sent to study Indian farming techniques. Indian mathematicians developed what we now call the “Arabic” number system, including negative numbers and zero, and gave definitions of the trigonometric functions sine and cosine.

The Golden Age of Islam

In the middle of the 8th century, the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate moved the capital of its empire from Damascus to Baghdad. Guided by the Quranic slogan “The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr”, Caliph Harun al-Rashid founded the House of Wisdom in his new capital, intending it to be a library and centre for research. Scholars collected books from the old Greek city states and India and translated them into Arabic. This is how many of the ancient texts would eventually reach the West, where they were largely unknown in the Middle Ages. By the middle of the 9th century, the library in Baghdad had grown to become a fine successor to the library at Alexandria.

  Among those who were inspired by the House of Wisdom were several astronomers, notably al-Sufi, who built on the work of Hipparchus and Ptolemy. Astronomy was of practical use to Arab nomads for navigation, as they steered their camels across the desert at night. Alhazen, born in Basra and educated in Baghdad, was one of the first experimental scientists, and his book on optics has been likened in importance to the work of Isaac Newton. Arab alchemists devised distillation and other new techniques, and coined words such as alkali, aldehyde, and alcohol. Physician al-Razi introduced soap, distinguished for the first time between smallpox and measles, and wrote in one of his many books “The doctor’s aim is to do good, even to our enemies”. Al-Khwarizmi and other mathematicians invented algebra and algorithms; and engineer al-Jazari invented the crank-connecting rod system, which is still used in bicycles and cars. It would take several centuries for European scientists to catch up with these developments.