SECTION A
1. How has the identity of the scientific practitioner changed since 1500?
2. Are wars and political revolutions good for science?
SECTION B
3. How did early modern anatomists and natural philosophers challenge
Galenic views of bodies and diseases?
4. ‘From the closed world to the infinite universe’: is this a good description
of the changes in European cosmology between 1500 and 1800?
5. Isaac Newton’s ‘miraculous year’ at Woolsthorpe occurred in the same
decade as the foundation of the Royal Society. Which was more
important for science?
6. Was there a chemical revolution in the eighteenth century?
7. What led Charles Darwin to develop a theory of evolution?
8. How did scientific research emerge as a central activity of the modern
university?
9. ‘The key feature of modern medicine is that its diseases are defined in
laboratories.’ Use examples from the eighteenth, nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to assess this statement.
10. Is it fair to suggest that the greatest legacy of the eugenics movement is
The Pill?
11. Was the project to build an atomic bomb typical of the sciences in the
twentieth century?
12. Discuss the respective roles of evidence and philosophical
presuppositions in initiating major transformations in twentieth science,
using as your principal example EITHER the debates about the theory of
relativity OR the debates about continental drift.