Medieval
science
During late ancient
times and the early Middle Ages, the Aristotelian approach to exploration on
natural phenomena was used. Some ancient knowledge was lost, or in some cases
kept in obscurity, during the fall of the Roman Empire and interrupted
political struggle. However, the general fields of science, or natural
philosophy as it was called, and much of the general awareness from the ancient
world remain preserved though the works of the early Latin encyclopedists like
Isidore of Seville. Also, in the Byzantine empire, many Greek science texts
were preserved in Syriac translation done by groups such as Nestorians and
Monophysites. Majority of these were
translated later on into Arabic under the Caliphate, during which many types of
classical learning were preserved and in some cases improved upon. The House of
Wisdom was well-known in Abbasid-era Baghdad, Iraq. It is considered to have
been a major intellectual hub, at the time of the Islamic Golden Age, where
Muslim scholars such as al-Kindi and Ibn Sahl in Baghdad, and Ibn al-Haytham in
Cairo, flourished from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, until the Mongol pack
of Baghdad. Ibn al-Haytham, known later to the West as Alhazen, furthered the
Aristotelian perspective, by emphasize experimental data and the reproducibility
of its results. In the later medieval time , as demand for translations grew,
for example from the Toledo School of Translators, Western Europeans began collect
texts written not only in Latin, but also Latin paraphrases from Greek, Arabic,
and Hebrew. The texts of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Euclid, sealed in the Houses
of Wisdom, were sought amongst Catholic scholars. In Europe, Alhazen's De
Aspectibus directly prejudiced Roger Bacon (13th century) in England, who
argued for more untried science, as confirmed by Alhazen. By the late Middle
Ages, a synthesis of Catholicism and Aristotelianism known as Scholasticism was
flourishing in Western Europe, which had become a new geographic center of
science, but all aspects of scholasticism were criticized in the 15th and 16th
centuries.
The
scientific methods
The
scientific method way seeks to make
clear the events of nature in a reproducible way. An instructive thought experimentation
or hypothesis is put forward, as explanation, using principles such as
parsimony (also known as "Occam's Razor") and are generally expected
to seek consilience—fitting well with other customary facts associated to the
phenomena.This new elucidation is used to make falsifiable predictions that are
testable by experimentation or examination. The predictions are to be posted
before a confirming experiment or observation is sought, as proof that no
tampering has occurred. Disproof of a calculation is evidence of development
This is done to a degree through surveillance of natural phenomena, but also
through experimentation, that tries to simulate natural events under prohibited
conditions, as appropriate to the discipline (in the observational sciences,
such as astronomy or geology, a predicted observation might take the place of a
controlled experiment). Experimentation is especially important in science to
help set up causal associations (to avoid the correlation fallacy).
