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Overview

Since the fifth century BCE, scholars have used scientific tools to better understand our world. This trend has only accelerated in the last 100 years or so.

Thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as amazing technological developments, the past one hundred years have brought us many remarkable discoveries. These key points are both a helpful catalog of those major breakthroughs and a handy report card on where we now stand in relation to them.

In this passage, you’ll learn about the Greek philosopher Democritus, who had some ideas about atoms. You’ll also find out that modern science is in conflict with itself and that there are grains of matter around us.

Big Idea #1: Modern science began with the scholars of ancient Greece and the experiments of the late Middle Ages.

For thousands of years, human beings had to rely on supernatural explanations for things that happened. But in 500 BCE, Greeks started relying more and more on reason and observation to explain the world around them.

Anaximander used rational methods to explain how rain fell from the sky. He explained that it wasn’t due to a benevolent god, but rather because of evaporation.

Not long after Democritus came up with his ideas, another scholar named Epicurus hypothesized that matter is made of tiny building blocks. Since there can be no division without a beginning (theory of spatial extension), these building blocks must also be limited in size.

Throughout history, there have been many advancements in mathematics. The ancient Greeks were the first to use math for understanding and describing our universe.

Ptolemy was born in 100 CE. He created formulas that predicted the positions of planets, allowing us to know where they would be at a certain time and date.

A thousand years later, during the Middle Ages, scholars returned to ancient tools of mathematics and reason. This allowed them to revolutionize astronomy by proving that celestial bodies could be better calculated once the sun was considered their center.

In the same way, Galileo was the first to see Earth’s moon and Jupiter’s moons using a telescope. He tested his hypotheses with experiments that were repeatable. This helped create what we now call the scientific method.

One belief was that all objects fall at a constant speed. However, Galileo’s tests revealed that it wasn’t speed but acceleration (the rate of increased speed) among falling objects.

Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that every second, the speed of any falling object on Earth will increase by 9.8 meters per second.

Big Idea #2: Newton’s theory of universal gravitation was upended in the twentieth century by Albert Einstein.

A hundred years after Galileo’s work, Isaac Newton came to the realization that the force affecting an object in orbit was likely the same force behind falling objects.

Isaac Newton was aware of the force that caused objects to fall to earth. He realized that there must be a universal force at work, and he set out to prove it with his theory of gravity.

Newton’s theory of gravity was a giant leap forward in scientific understanding. It marked the first time that scientists singled out a force connecting earthly laws with those of celestial bodies.

While Newton might have been a genius, he also realized that the world was not yet completely understood. There were still forces of nature at work that hadn’t been discovered yet.

In the nineteenth century, scientists found electromagnetism, a force that binds together atoms and molecules.