Portal:History of science

Ancient, medieval and Renaissance astronomers and philosophers developed many different theories about the dynamics of the celestial spheres. They explained the motions of the various nested spheres in terms of the materials of which they were made, external movers such as celestial intelligences, and internal movers such as motive souls or impressed forces. Most of these models were qualitative, although a few of them incorporated quantitative analyses that related speed, motive force and resistance. (Full article...)

1675 image of a Chinese astronomer with an elaborate armillary sphere. In the 17th century, Chinese astronomers collaborated extensively with Jesuit scholars, who brought the Copernican and Tychonic systems from Europe.

...that the travel narrative The Malay Archipelago, by biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, was used by the novelist Joseph Conrad as a source for his novel Lord Jim?

...that the seventeenth century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, along with their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes all formulated definitions of conatus, an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself?

...that according to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, the rise of realism in Renaissance art, such as Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (pictured), was largely due to the use of curved mirrors and other optical aids?

Edward Drinker Cope (July 28, 1840 – April 12, 1897) was an American zoologist, paleontologist, comparative anatomist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, he distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science, publishing his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations.

Cope had little formal scientific training, and he eschewed a teaching position for field work. He made regular trips to the American West, prospecting in the 1870s and 1880s, often as a member of U.S. Geological Survey teams. A personal feud between Cope and paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh led to a period of intense fossil-finding competition now known as the Bone Wars. Cope's financial fortunes soured after failed mining ventures in the 1880s, forcing him to sell off much of his fossil collection. He experienced a resurgence in his career toward the end of his life before dying on April 12, 1897. (Full article...)

• 1735 - Birth of Torbern Bergman, Swedish chemist (d. 1784)

• 1878 - Death of Julius Robert von Mayer, German physician and physicist (b. 1814)

• 1879 - Birth of Maud Menten, Canadian biochemist (d. 1960)

• 1899 - Death of Franz Ritter von Hauer, Austrian geologist (b. 1822)

• 1916 - Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity

• 1933 - Birth of Alexander Gorodnitsky, Russian geologist and poet

• 1938 - Birth of Sergei Novikov, Soviet and Russian mathematician, Fields Medalist

• 1940 - Death of Alfred Ploetz, German physician, biologist, and eugenicist (b. 1860)

• 1983 - Death of Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov, Soviet mathematician (b. 1891)

• 1993 - Death of Polykarp Kusch, German-born American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1911)