Beginnings of Science

Beginnings of Science
The oldest known treatise on surgery..... written in Egypt 5,000 years ago, discloses  the thoughts of the earliest man who reveals a scientific attitude of mind.

This treatise is therefore the earliest document in the history of science. A history of science might be based on some more or less logical system of definitions and classification. Such systems and such points of view belong to relatively recent and mature periods.

The periods at which primitive man of different races began to have conscious appreciation of the phenomenon of nature, of number magnitude and geometric forms can never be known, nor the time at which their elementary notions began to be so classified and associated as to deserve the name of science.

Very early in any civilization, however there must obviously have been developed simple processes of counting and adding, of time and distance measurement, of the geometry and arithmetic involved in land measurement and in architectural design and construction.
Beginnings of Science

Al-Kindi (801–873 CE)

Al-Kindi or Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī was a Muslim Arab philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physician and musician. He was known as Al-Kindus by Western world.

Al-Kindi began his education at either Kufah or Basra, and completed it at Baghdad the centers of culture of his day.

Both Kufah and Basra were places of intense and original intellectual activity by the tome of Al-Kindi’s birth; this activity centered on a number of disciplines indigenous to Islamic culture such as Arabic grammar, the explication of the Qur'an and the principles of law, all of which would have important consequences for philosophy.

He studied Fiqh and the new born discipline called, kalam, but it seems that he was more interested in science and philosophy, to which he unsecrated the rest of his life, especially after he went to Baghdad.

Al-Kindi learnt Greek, but certainly he mastered the syriac language from which he translated several works.

He became well known in the Abbasid capital as a scholar and physician, enjoyed the patronage of the caliphs al Ma’mun and al-Mu’tasim and was appointed tutor of the latter’s son Ahmad.

Al-Kindi wrote hundred of papers on Greek philosophy, science, ethics, cosmology, metaphysics and what is known today as psychology, from an Islamic perspective.

He is a major contributor to the introduction of Greek philosophy to the Muslim World, although he was not afraid to contradict the Greek thinkers if he believed it conflicted with Islamic teachings.

Al-Kindi died on 873 in Baghdad, Iraq.
Al-Kindi (801–873 CE)

The history of Greek science

The birth of Greek science and philosophy did not occur in what is now Greek itself but in the city of Miletus and their Hellenic colonies on the Aegean coasts of Asia Minor.

It is certain that Greek science in its origin was dependent on traditions that came from more ancient civilizations, notably from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Herodotus was the first to suggest that the Greeks obtained their knowledge of astronomy from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Greek sciences period can be divided into four main chronological divisions:
*Pre-Socratic period (600 BC – 400 BC)
*The century of Plato and Aristotle later the creation of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophies.
*Hellenistic period (300-100 BC)
*Greco-Roman period, from about 100 BC to 600 AD

One of the major features of Greek science is that most of its practitioners were autodidacts. Even those who studied under a philosophical giant seem, with very few exceptions, not to have been content to follow a path laid down by a predecessor.

They wished to carve out their own path, citing predecessors’ view when it suited them, and ignoring them likewise.

In medicine, to early Greeks, it had seemed as if there were differing forces or powers within their bodies, to which they gave a variety of names, Plato describes three competing ‘souls’ one located in the liver, one located in the heart and one located in the head.

Most other early Greek thinkers located most or all of the human soul in the heart, as did Aristotle and Zenon, and it remain part of the collection of ideas.

The Greek since was bound to decline because of the lack of balance between reason and experience, because of its organicist setting, or because of its functioning in a slave society, or it happened to decline with the advent of the Romans and of Christianity.
The history of Greek science

What is Science?

What is Science?
Science is often conceived as a body of knowledge. Reflection, however will lead to the conclusion that this cannot be its true nature.

History repeatedly shown that a body of scientific knowledge that ceases to develop soon ceases to be science at all.

The science of one age has often become the nonsense of the next. Consider, for example, astrology; or again, the idea that certain numbers are lucky or unlucky.

With their history unknown, who would see in these superstitious the remnants of far-reaching scientific doctrines that once attracted clear thinking minds seeking rational explanations of the working of the world?

Yet such, in fact is their origin. So too, we agree at the explanation of fossils as the early and clumsier attempts of an All-powerful Creator to produce the more perfect beings that we know ourselves to be.

Science is no static body of knowledge but rather an active process that can be followed through the ages.

The sheer validity and success of the process in our own age has given rise to a good deal of misunderstanding of its native and not a little misapplication of such terns as ‘science’ and ‘scientific’.

There is nothing in the laws of this or any other country which forbids its citizens from giving worlds of their language such significance as they may choose, but science and scientific as employed in these connection have no relation to the great progressive acquisition of knowledge.

The very from of the adjective ‘scientific’ might give pause to those who would force the word to cover such topics as the skill of the boxer, or a knowledge of the theory and practice of the sacraments.

By derivation scientific means knowledge making, and no body of doctrine which is not growing, which is not actually being made, can long retain the attributes of science.
What is Science?

Modern History of Artificial Intelligence

Modern History of Artificial Intelligence
Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Artificial intelligence can be defined as the study and design of intelligent agents, where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and take actions which maximize its chances of success.

Scientists began their research in artificial intelligence based on discoveries in neurology, mathematical theory, cybernetics and new invention in computer which based on mathematical reasoning.

In the 17th century, Descartes gave advent to more advanced thinking when he proposed the idea that animals are, in theory, nothing more than complex machine. Thomas Hobbes wrote in his famous Leviathan, which basically translates to “reason is nothing more than reckoning.” The idea that reasoning in human beings can be simplified into algebraic calculations was further discussed by Gottfried Leibniz, who coined the term characteristica universalis or universal language of reasoning.

The true driving factor of Artificial Intelligence came in the 1940’s with the creation of the electronic computer. Advancements in computer theory and computer science led to advancements in Artificial Intelligence as well. Since machines could now begin to manipulate numbers and symbols, this manipulation was thought to somehow be the basics of human thought. Princeton’s Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch began work on the neural network, which attempted to give a mathematical description of the human brain.

In 1956 John MacCarthy from MIT coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ as the topic of at Dartmouth Conference. He then invented the Lisp language in 1958. Dartmouth Conference was held at Dartmouth College in summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of artificial intelligence for many decades.

Within seven years after the conference, artificial intelligent began to pick up momentum. The ideas formed before were re-examined and further research was placed. In 1961, James Slagle in his PhD dissertation at MIT wrote the first symbolic integration program, SAINT which can solved calculus problems. In 1964, Danny Bobrow from MIT shows that computers can understand natural language enough to solve algebra world programs

In 1980 First National Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence held at Stanford.

In early 1990s, The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign develop and release the first widely used web browser, called Mosaic. The military put Artificial Intelligence based hardware to the test of war during Desert Storm. Artificial Intelligence-based technologies were used in missile systems, heads-up-displays, and other advancements. Artificial Intelligence has also made the transition to the home. With the popularity of the Artificial Intelligence computer growing, the interest of the public has also grown. Applications for the Apple Macintosh and IBM compatible computer, such as voice and character recognition have become available.

Late 1990’s, web crawls and other artificial intelligence information extraction programs become essential in widespread use of the World Wide Web.
Modern History of Artificial Intelligence

A brief history of Celsius

A brief history of Celsius
In modern science Celsius is a temperature scale which zero degrees is the freezing points of water and 100 degrees is the boiling point. Temperature in this scale is generally denoted by °C or C alone.

The Celsius scale is widely known as the centigrade scale because it is divided into 100 degrees. It is named for the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius, who established the scale in 1742.

Anders Celsius was born in Uppsala. His grandfathers were both professors in Uppsala: mathematician and astronomer. His father was a professor in astronomy. He is very talented in mathematics from the early age, was appointed professor in astronomy in 1730.

During student times he became engaged in general problem of weights and measures, including temperature measurements. Anders Celsius should be recognized as the first to perform and publish careful experiments aiming at the definition of an international temperature scale on scientific grounds. He determined the dependence of the boiling of water with atmospheric pressure (in excellence agreement with modern data). He further gave a rule the determination of the boiling point if the barometric pressure deviates from a certain standard pressure.

Celsius published most of his work in publications of the Royal Society of Sciences and in Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
A brief history of Celsius

Discovery of Blood Circulation by Ibnu Nafis

Discovery of Blood Circulation by Ibnu Nafis
Ala-al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Abi al-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi (known as Ibn Al-Nafis) was born in 1213 A.D. in Damascus. He was educated at the Medical College Hospital (Bimaristan Al-Noori) founded by Noor al-Din Al-Zanki. Apart from medicine, Ibn al-Nafis learned jurisprudence, literature and theology. He thus became a renowned expert on the Shafi'i School of Jurisprudence as well as a reputed physician. In 1236

Ibn Nafis moved to Egypt and worked in Al-Nassri Hospital then in Al-Mansouri Hospital where he became chief of physicians and the Sultan’s personal physician. When he died in 1288 A.D. he donated his house, library and clinic to the Mansuriya Hospital .

The most voluminous of his books is Al-Shamil fi al-Tibb, which was designed to be an encyclopedia comprising 300 volumes, but was not completed as a result of his death. The manuscript is available in Damascus. His book on ophthalmology is largely an original contribution and is also extant. His book that became most famous, however, was Mujaz al-Qanun (The Summary of Law) and a number of commentaries that were written on this same topic. His commentaries include one on Hippocrates' book, and several volumes on Ibn Sina's Qanun, which are still extant. Likewise he wrote a commentary on Hunayn Ibn Ishaq's book. Another famous book embodying his original contribution was on the effects of diet on health entitled Kitab al-Mukhtar fi al-Aghdhiya.

His major original contribution of great significance was his discovery of the pulmonary circulation, which was re-discovered by modern science after a lapse of three centuries. He was the first to correctly describe the constitution of the lungs and gave a description of the bronchi and the interaction between the human body's vessels for air and blood. He also elaborated on the function of the coronary arteries as suppliers of blood to the cardiac musculature.
Discovery of Blood Circulation by Ibnu Nafis