History of Science History of Science
Answer question one question one from Section A question one Section A and three Section A three questions chosen from Section B three Section B. Section B
SECTION A
1 Where has science been done?
SECTION B SECTION B
2 ‘The revolution in astronomy and natural philosophy was accomplished by Kepler.’ Discuss.
3 ‘In the 17th century, from Galileo to Boyle, the greatest changes in natural philosophy came
through the use of instruments, not of mathematics.’ Discuss.
4 What was mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century?
5 Discuss the importance of commerce and industry to natural philosophy between 1650 and
1750.
6 Is the 18th the century of fluids and forces in natural philosophy?
7 EITHER How and why did the scientific career change during the nineteenth century?
OR How did the “hospital medicine” created after the French Revolution differ from
eighteenth-century “bedside medicine”, on the one hand, and late nineteenth-century
“laboratory medicine”, on the other?
8 How did Freud turn a medical practice specialising in nervous diseases into a laboratory of the
normal human mind?
9 EITHER “Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower
races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.” (Charles
Darwin) How and why has the theory of natural selection been applied to the human species?
OR Charles Darwin has sometimes been called the last of the natural theologians. Why?
10 EITHER Was the process leading to the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA
characteristic of scientific work in the aftermath of World War II?
OR How did developments in atomic physics during the first half of the twentieth century,
including those leading to the splitting of the uranium atom, change the image of the scientist?
11 Would physics be different had Einstein not lived?
12 What roles have women played in the history of the oral contraceptive pill?