When was modern science invented?
So I found myself writing a history of our ideas about the body, and I was stuck until I realised one couldn’t do it unless one wrote about how knowledge had advanced – despite the fact that historians aren’t supposed to write about progress. The notion that any discussion of progress must be anachronistic and disrespectful of cultural difference established itself in the 1970s, and no one in the profession has really dared question it since, and the result has been that historians of medicine don’t discuss, any more, whether doctors were actually helping their patients.
.. for the last thirty years historians have shied away from any discussion of why knowledge of nature improved in the seventeenth century because of their fear of writing what is called Whig history, history which is written with the benefit of hindsight; and second, some procedures – such as the experimental method– seem so obvious to us that we have difficulty in thinking our way back into a world where that method was not employed; and some ways of thinking, embodied in our language, seem so natural that people simply haven’t been aware of the historical process which led to their construction.
.. The discovery of America proved that the knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans was seriously incomplete – it encouraged people to believe in the possibility of progress in knowledge, and this was embodied in a new word, “discovery”, and a new practice,eponymy, naming discoveries after people (America after Amerigo Vespucci). It is only after the discovery of America, for example, that Pythagoras’s theorem is named after Pythagoras – innovation was now rewarded with immortal fame.
.. it became clear that long-standing debates amongst the philosophers could be definitively settled by the acquisition of new information – the idea seems obvious to us, but that is only because we live in a post-Columbus world.
.. The printing press is crucial in intensifying the communication of information – it makes it possible to consult more sources, compare authorities, keep up to date with new discoveries. It thus creates a new type of intellectual community and a new type of knowledge – knowledge that has passed the test of being subjected to the critical inspection of a wider community of experts, what we call “peer review”.
.. Newton, I argue, could only propound his new theory of gravity because he had the idea of a “theory” – something very different from a proof on the one hand or a working hypothesis on the other. So I think historians and scientists as they work on the history of science regularly overlook the power of certain intellectual tools ..