Birth of modern science

Praveen S
Monday, February 28, 2022

Modern science is rapidly progressing. However, modern science is becoming more complicated and less comprehensible for those not trained in it. Still, the fundamental logic of modern science remains the same; whether it is natural sciences or social sciences; whether the purpose is for development or the degeneration of human life. 

Though common men will not be able to understand the purpose, concepts, and logic of modern science, they can appreciate it if they can understand the origin and underlying principles of modern science. The root of modern science comes from mathematics and practical arts. Specifically, modern science can be argued as the child of deductive reasoning from mathematics and experimentation from practical arts. 

Mathematics, probably geometry, was responsible for the growth in deductive reasoning. Remember your school days, deducing the properties of complex geometrical diagrams knowing some distant property of the geometric figure, like one of the angles or length of a line segment. The same logic gets applied in modern science when the scientist deduces the truth of the observed phenomena from some distant observations. For example, when a scientist observes certain consumer behavior to explain and predict another distant behavior, such as purchasing chocolates at a certain frequency to deduce his travel plans. Like our complex geometric model we have studied in school, the scientist uses a complex theoretical model for prediction. The art of deduction is thus central to the development and progress of modern science.  

Equally important to modern science are methods of experimentation. Experimentation is not new to humans; practical arts relied on experimentation several centuries before modern science. Humans are understood to rely on experimentation in different prehistoric practical arts such as hunting, earlier forms of agriculture, and cooking. For example, changing the ingredients of a cooking recipe to vary the taste is experimentation is similar to experimenting with different tools for hunting. Almost all practical arts, ancient or modern, rely on experimentation for improvisation in practice. 

What has given rise to this mix between deduction and experimentation? Maybe, we could say, free time! At a particular juncture in human history, many men were free because of the division of labor. Rather than focusing on the immediacy of solving practical arts, they began to become curious about the world around us and started deducing theories about it. The next step was to apply the experimentation to test and formalize these deductions. Thus, humans might have begun to mix deduction and experimentation to find answers to things they were curious about in their free time.