Charles Darwin

Archimedes

Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 BC - c. 212 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer. Although little is known about his life, he is regarded as one of the most important scientists in classical antiquity. In addition to making important discoveries in the field of mathematics and geometry, he is credited with producing machines that were well ahead of their time.

The Ancient Roman historians showed a strong interest in Archimedes and wrote several biographies relating to his life and works, while the few copies of his treatises that survived through the Middle Ages were a major influence on scientists during the Renaissance.

Archimedes produced the first known summation of an infinite series with a method that is still used in the area of calculus today.

Archimedes was a famous mathematician whose theorems and philosophies became world known. He gained a reputation in his own time which few other mathematicians of this period achieved. He is considered by most historians of mathematics as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

Aristotle

Aristotle (384 BC - March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote many books about physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, government, and biology.

Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, are generally considered the three most influential ancient Greek philosophers in Western thought. Among them they transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle form the core of Ancient philosophy.

Aristotle placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses and would correspondingly be better classed among modern empiricists (see materialism and empiricism). He also achieved a "grounding" of dialectic in the Topics by allowing interlocutors to begin from commonly held beliefs (Endoxa); his goal being non-contradiction rather than Truth. He set the stage for what would eventually develop into the scientific method centuries later. Although he wrote dialogues early in his career, no more than fragments of these have survived.

The works of Aristotle that still exist today are in treatise form and were, for the most part, unpublished texts. These were probably lecture notes or texts used by his students, and were almost certainly revised repeatedly over the course of years. As a result, these works tend to be eclectic, dense and difficult to read.

Among the most important ones are Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics.

Their works, although connected in many fundamental ways, are very different in both style and substance.

Aristotle is known for being one of the few figures in history who studied almost every subject possible at the time. In science, Aristotle studied anatomy, astronomy, embryology, geography, geology, meteorology, physics, and zoology.

In philosophy, Aristotle wrote on aesthetics, economics, ethics, government, metaphysics, politics, psychology, rhetoric and theology. He also dealt with education, foreign customs, literature and poetry. His combined works practically comprise an encyclopedia of Greek knowledge.

Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically-based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" - On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres - is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution.

Publication of De Revolutionibus

Although Greek, Indian and Muslim savants had published heliocentric hypotheses centuries before Copernicus, his publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism, demonstrating that the motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe, stimulated further scientific investigations and became a landmark in the history of modern science that is known as the Copernican Revolution.

Among the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classical scholar, translator, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist. Among his many responsibilities, astronomy figured as little more than an avocation - yet it was in that field that he made his mark upon the world.

Copernicus proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that the Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the precession of the equinoxes.

This representation of the heavens is usually called the heliocentric, or "Sun-centred," system--derived from the Greek Helios, meaning "Sun." Copernicus's theory had important consequences for later thinkers of the scientific revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.

Commentariolus

In the Commentariolus (Little Commentary), Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his revolutionary Copernican heliocentrism theory of the solar system, about three decades before he finally published his major six volume work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Copernicus did not publish the Commentariolus, and handed it only to few friends. It is unknown who received the Commentariolus, and when. He had written the preliminary manuscript description of his early version of the theory sometime before 1515. Some scholars believe it was as late as 1533 due to the maturity of the theory. It was never printed or otherwise published during Copernicus's lifetime, and its existence was only known indirectly until copies were published in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The only other astronomical work written by Copernicus, besides the Commentariolus and De Revolutionibus, was a letter written in 1524 to one of his former fellow students at the Cracow Academy, Bernard Wapowski (The Letter against Werner). This letter, which, like the Commentariolus, circulated in manuscript but was not published during Copernicus's own lifetime, criticized De motu octauæ Sphæræ tractatus primus, a work published in 1522 by Johannes Werner, which outlined a method of trepidations to account for purported variations in the rate of precession of the equinoxes.

The Commentariolus was known among scholars. In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered in Rome a series of lectures outlining Copernicus' theory. The lectures were heard with interest by Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals. On 1 November 1536, Nikolaus Cardinal von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote a letter to Copernicus from Rome, urging him to publish. Georg Joachim Rheticus and Tiedemann Giese[citation needed] then compiled an introduction to Copernicus' theory, the Narratio Prima, to be published by Franz Rhode in 1540. This was instrumental for Copernicus' approval to publish De revolutionibus.

He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist he supported the idea of an American nation. As a diplomat during the American Revolution he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible.

Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin, "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."

Franklin became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in Philadelphia, becoming very wealthy, writing and publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin was interested in science and technology, and gained international renown for his famous experiments. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society.

Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. From 1775 to 1776, Franklin was Postmaster General under the Continental Congress and from 1785 to 1788 was President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he became one of the most prominent abolitionists.

His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, has seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references.

Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles.

He also developed a law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air.

He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum.

Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars.

Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton actually spent more time working on alchemy than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter.

Newton played a major role in the development of calculus, sharing credit with Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalised binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736­1813), said that "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."Galileo Galilei

February 15, 1564 - January 8, 1642

Galileo Galilei was a Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism.

Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics",the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science." The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, taught in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honour, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, improving compass design.

Galileo's championing of Copernicanism was controversial within his lifetime. The geocentric view had been dominant since the time of Aristotle, and the controversy engendered by Galileo's presentation of heliocentrism as proven fact resulted in the Catholic Church's prohibiting its advocacy as empirically proven fact, because it was not empirically proven at the time and was contrary to the literal meaning of Scripture. Galileo was eventually forced to recant his heliocentrism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of the Roman Inquisition.

His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion.

His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature.

Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.

To elaborate, theories of evolution existed prior to Darwin - there was wide scientific acceptance of the principle that organisms evolved into new species. Prior to Darwin, the actual mechanism was uncertain. Darwin's breakthrough was natural selection, whereby organisms change by optimising to their environments. They do this either in response to change, or to exploit untapped environmental resources - think of the camel's adaptation to low rainfall/desert environments. Objectors to the theory of evolution claim that evolution is just a theory. They are correct. Objectors are wrong to suggest that, being a theory, evolution is not factual.

A theory is a statement of confidence, where a law (in science) is a numerically-provable fact, such as Newton's Law of Gravity. The absence of a mathematically-elegant formula (such as Newton's Law) does not reduce the validity and predictive usefulness of a theory.

Evolution is confidently demonstrated every day by the emergence of new antibiotic-resistant bacteria and by calici-virus-resistant rabbits. Challenging these organisms has killed off all but the few which are naturally resistant. Over time, the resistant strains become the main part of the population.

Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs) (384 BC - 322 BC) Wikipedia.

The date of birth is unknown, yet Aristotle was born in 384 BC and died in 322 BC, aged 61 or 62.