History of Science
SECTION A
1 On the evidence of history, does science change gradually or through revolution?
2 “Religion has helped science but science has harmed religion.” Discuss.
SECTION B
3 What did mathematics mean to its practitioners and patrons in ancient and
medieval Iraq?
4 Was travel or experiment more important to the development of the life sciences
in early modern Europe?
5 Either (a) Were showmanship and publicity-seeking necessary for natural
philosophical success in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
Or (b) How did instruments shape natural philosophy in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries?
6 What roles did classification and quantification play in the early development of
physics and chemistry?
7 ‘Read little, see much, do much’. How closely does Fourcroy’s exhortation reflect
changes in European medical education and practice in the late 18th and early
19th centuries?
8 Either (a) In what ways, if any, would the history of science be different if
Charles Darwin had drowned on the Beagle?
Or (b) Did Gregor Mendel finish what Charles Darwin had begun?
9 Why are there so few women in histories of nineteenth-century science?
10 Either (a) What made it possible for Albert Einstein to propose the theory of
special relativity in 1905?
Or (b) Why did the scientific community respond as it did to the dropping of
the atomic bombs in 1945?
11 Either (a) Why is the history of psychiatry so marked by repeated oscillation
between psychological and physical methods of treatment?
or (b) How did the construction of sickle-cell anaemia as a “molecular
disease” impact on its research and treatment?