SECTION A
1. “The history of the sciences is a great fugue, [a musical composition] in
which the voices of the nations come one after the other to the fore.”
(J. W. v. Goethe) Do you agree?
2. How has government patronage affected the historical development of
natural sciences?
SECTION B
3. How did instruments shape the development of early modern science?
4. What was the role of empirical observation in early modern science?
5. Was there a revolution in eighteenth-century chemistry?
6. Did modern science begin around 1800?
7. Why was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species an important book
in the nineteenth century?
8. What were the relationships, if any, between tropical medicine and
European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century?
9. What did Robert Oppenheimer mean when he told the atomic scientists
at Los Alamos in 1945 that “there is nothing in atomic weapons – there is
certainly nothing that we have done here or in the physics or chemistry
that immediately preceded our work here – in which any revolutionary
ideas were involved”?
10. Has the increasing dominance of commercial considerations
fundamentally changed the practice of science since the 1970s?
11. Using specific examples, discuss how molecules became involved in the
twentieth-century politics of gender and of race.
12. What does the history of climate change tell us about how the scientific
community has changed?