• Question: who first invented science

    Asked by sleepingbeauty on 7 Jan 2015.
    • Photo: Fiona Dickinson

      Fiona Dickinson answered on 7 Jan 2015:


      I don’t think anyone invented science, as long as there have been people I am sure there have been people that wondered why things were the way they were or what happened if you did something or why it happened. The ancient greeks (3000 years ago) knew that light traveled in straight lines, when people made paint, or cooked food, or made weapons or fire they were all doing science and engineering.

      It took a lot of know how to make the ancient monuments like the pyramids or stone henge or irrigation ditches in india, and these are all thousands of years old, people had to question and wonder, and test and rethink and test again. A giant pyramid doesn’t just happen you have to perfect the method.

      Things like stone henge show that the ancient people of britain new about things like a solar year, about the equinoxes (day and night same length) and about shaping and moving massive rocks. They also had fire, some basic medicines and navigation (people travelled from all over europe to visit stone henge even thousands of years ago).

      But science moved on, in 1660 the Royal Society (of the UK) was founded by some of the leading scientists of the time Christopher Wren (best known as an architect) and Robert Boyle (he was interested in gases). This changed science as now telling people what you had found out became important, the publication ‘proceedings of the royal society’ has described all sorts of experiments from Isaac Newton’s discovery of white light being able to be split into a spectrum to Benjamin Franklin (the American President) showing lightning was a type of electricity. This reporting of science so other people can check is still massively important today and changed the way the world undertook scientific research.

      I can’t say who invented science but scientific method was almost certainly invented by the Royal Society.

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