History of Science
SECTION A
1. If you were writing a book entitled the Origins of Modern Science,
which historical period would it be about?
2. In what ways do earlier centuries’ conceptions of the scientific role
continue to inform our understanding of what it means to be a scientist
in the twenty-first century?
SECTION B
3. Compare and contrast the ways in which knowledge of the natural
world was made by physicians and natural philosophers in early
modern Europe.
4. Did experimental philosophy displace the magical and occult arts in the
seventeenth century?
5. What was the role of novel instrumentation in the development of
electricity and of chemistry during the eighteenth century?
6. Discuss this extract from a 1971 advertisement for the Financial Times:
‘Isaac Newton is the British physicist linked forever in the schoolboy
mind with an apple that fell and bore fruit throughout physics.’
7. What differences did laboratories make to the development of the
sciences during the nineteenth century? Discuss in relation EITHER to
the physical sciences OR to the life sciences.
8. Was Charles Darwin a professional scientist?
9. Did Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift initiate a scientific
revolution?
10. What effect did the discovery of the structure of DNA have on the
biological sciences?
11. ‘It is of no significance whatsoever where nineteenth-century medical
science was done. What matters is how.’ Discuss.
12. Compare and contrast ideas about the origins and purpose of science
in ancient and medieval Iraq.