Before "Science" came "Natural Philosopy"

[MineralMan]

I have a school textbook printed in the 1870s. Its title is "Natural Philosopy." It's a basic science book for high school aged children, and covers all of the sciences. It's very interesting to read, since it exposes how little we knew, even at that late date, historically. The Theory of Evolution was just beginning to be talked about in such textbooks, and was far from being accepted.

We knew nothing about plate tectonics, and could look no closer than optical microscopes and no farther than telescopes could reveal. I really recommend reading a 19th century Natural Philosophy book for anyone interested in science. It's an eye-opener, and will make you appreciate how much more we know now than we did then.

I love reading older books about natural phenomena. If you're interested, just drop into any large used bookstore. Natural Philosophy books from the mid to late 19th century can be found in most of them, and for prices that won't even buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Get one. Read it. I guarantee you'll be entertained and better informed about our progress. The perspective is very useful.

https://archive.org/details/anaturalphiloso08quacgoog

Here's the one I have, from archive.org. It's downloadable in several formats for reading.

[DetlefK]

1. "philosophia naturalis" was a Renaissance-era discipline of science:

Back then, the world-view was one where magical influences (e.g. astrology, numerology, magical images and incantations...), practical experiments ("philosophia naturalis", e.g. engineering, chemistry...) and the human mind (by way of a crude version of psychology) were all interconnected.

Back then, psychology and magic overlapped, just as magic and experiments overlapped.

At about 1700, magic fell into ever-deeper disrepute. By 1800, the magical world-view was basically extinct.
Psychology became a separate field of study.
"philosophia naturalis" became the dominant way of exploring and explaining the world, especially once it received massive support from 19th century mathematicians like Leibniz.

[longship]

3. Leibniz died in 1716!

[DetlefK]

5. My bad. I had Leibniz at the top of my head.

There was a big rivalry between numerologists and actual mathematicians at the time: numbers as an esoteric concept vs numbers as a logical concept. A rivalry the numerologists eventually lost. I remember Mersenne (famous for his work on prime numbers) being a strong critic of them.

I could have sworn it was Leibniz, but I think I mixed him up with somebody else. My bad.

[longship]

7. Yup! Leibniz invented calculus, independent from Newton.

Newton never forgave him for it. They were at war throughout their lives. Modern calculus uses the more general Leibniz notation instead of Newton's fluxion "dot" notation, which ignored dependent variables.

[Lionel Mandrake]

9. Actually, modern science uses both notations.

Newton's dot is often used to denote time derivatives. For example an x with a dot over it means exactly the same thing as dx/dt.

[longship]

11. Yup, I remember that.

But not all derivatives are time domain. The dot notation is pretty much limited to kinematics and stuff like that. In my physics education we pretty much used Leibniz notation exclusively. Mixing the two is just too confusing.

Actually, much was vector calculus, so we then used differential vector operators, div, grad, and curl along with Leibniz. Lots of integrals.

That was many years ago.

[DetlefK]

2. I recently found a 100-year-old book of Dante's "Divine Comedy" for 20 bucks.

[rickford66]

4. Most of my engineering colleagues understand Global Warming

There must be a reason.

[MineralMan]

6. Sure. They think rationally.

That's all it takes.

[hunter]

8. I downloaded this for my Kobo e-paper e-book. Thanks.

Isaac Newton was a master, and a creator, of the modern world's clockwork universe physics. Alas, his alchemy experiments were not so successful, and hazardous to his already fragile mental health. Furthermore, we do not live in a clockwork universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

There's much in this book of people trying to reconcile their observations with their religion.

Creator than the nice adaptation of tliia wonderful instrument to the purposes for which it is designed.

686. Parts of the Eye.

The human eye is a spheroid,
about an inch in diameter, resting in a cavity below the
forehead, capable of being moved upward, downward, or
ffldewise, by muscles attached to it behind. It consists of
ten parts...

Creationist are still using this one, even though it's obvious that human eyes, if they were designed, must have been on one of our Creator's drunk days, a kludge.

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. Yep.

The intelligent designer was sober when he designed the cephalopod eye.

[struggle4progress]

12. Hmmm ... "Philosophi Naturalis Principia Mathematica" ranks among the greatest

science books of all time

[byronius]

13. Neal Stephenson's 'Baroque' trilogy brilliantly traces this history.

Only Neal could make the history of mathematics a pirate-infested thriller.

It's AWESOME.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. 'Science' gradually moved to mean roughly 'natural philosophy'; 'scientist' didn't exist till 1834

We can trace it exactly, because the word (like many scientific ones in the first half of the 19th century) was first recorded, and possibly invented, by William Whewell :

One of Whewell's greatest gifts to science was his wordsmithing. He often corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with new terms for their discoveries. Whewell contributed the terms scientist, physicist, linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism[1] amongst others; Whewell suggested the terms electrode, ion, dielectric, anode, and cathode to Michael Faraday.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whewell

1834 W. Whewell in Q. Rev. 51 59 Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers... Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable.

It is possible that the ‘ingenious gentleman’ referred to in quot. 1834 is Whewell himself.

Oxford English Dictionary entry for 'scientist'