14
House of Wisdom
In the late 8th century CE, the
Abbasid caliphate set up the House
of Wisdom, a magnificent library,
in its new capital, Baghdad. This
inspired rapid advances in Islamic
science and technology. Many
ingenious mechanical devices were
invented, along with the astrolabe,
a navigational device that used the
positions of the stars. Alchemy
flourished, and techniques such as
distillation appeared. Scholars at
the library collected all the most
important books from Greece and
from India, and translated them
into Arabic, which is how the West
later rediscovered the works of
the ancients, and learned of the
“Arabic” numerals, including zero,
that were imported from India.
Birth of modern science
As the monopoly of the Church over
scientific truth began to weaken in
the Western world, the year 1543
saw the publication of two ground-
breaking books. Belgian anatomist
Andreas Vesalius produced De
Humani Corporis Fabrica, which
described his dissections of human
corpses with exquisite illustrations.
In the same year, Polish physician
Nicolaus Copernicus published De
Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium,
which stated firmly that the Sun is
the center of the universe,
overturning the Earth-centered
model figured out by Ptolemy of
Alexandria a millennium earlier.
In 1600, English physician
William Gilbert published De
Magnete in which he explained
that compass needles point north
because Earth itself is a magnet.
He even argued that Earth’s core
is made of iron. In 1623, another
English physician, William Harvey,
described for the first time how the
heart acts as a pump and drives
blood around the body, thereby
quashing forever earlier theories
that dated back 1,400 years to the
Greco-Roman physician Galen.
In the 1660s, Anglo-Irish chemist
Robert Boyle produced a string
of books, including The Sceptical
Chymist, in which he defined a
chemical element. This marked the
birth of chemistry as a science, as
distinct from the mystical alchemy
from which it arose.
Robert Hooke, who worked for a
time as Boyle’s assistant, produced
the first scientific best seller,
Micrographia, in 1665. His superb
fold-out illustrations of subjects
such as a flea and the eye of a fly
opened up a microscopic world no
one had seen before. Then in 1687
came what many view as the most
important science book of all time,Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ
Naturalis Principia Mathematica,
commonly known as the Principia.
His laws of motion and principle of
universal gravity form the basis for
classical physics.Elements, atoms, evolution
In the 18th century, French chemist
Antoine Lavoisier discovered the
role of oxygen in combustion,
discrediting the old theory of
phlogiston. Soon a host of new
gases and their properties were
being investigated. Thinking about
the gases in the atmosphere led
British meteorologist John Dalton toINTRODUCTION
I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the
seashore, and diverting myself
in now and then finding a
smoother pebble...whilst the
great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton