It is surprising sometimes to think; in this robust and fast moving world, how much of our modern lives we owe to science. Certainly in the moments from when you booted your computer to when you pulled up this article to read it hundreds of scientific principles were occurring. Of course all of the phenomenon we experience daily isn’t science so to speak; rather it is our understanding our world which is science. Traced back to the dawn of mankind science is a question that constantly evolves with our understanding of the world around us.
Perhaps the most important use of science is in technology. In more ancient times a certain guess and test principle was used, but that isn’t very dependable at all. Philosophy dominated thinking in ancient times and was perhaps the beginning of humans trying to understand exactly what made the world tick. Great philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato wrote about the world around them but their view was still very limited. For them their world must have seemed nearly infinite and a very confounding world at that. The problem with ancient studies was a lack of a principle which united ideas and tested them. It wouldn’t be until the Renaissance that modern science was born.
During the Renaissance science came to the forefront and a new era of thinking had begun; all thanks to the scientific method. This method allowed scientist to more dependably observe the world. Suddenly theories were becoming rampant about how things worked. This scientific method is crucial to all the advancements in today’s world allowing scientist to experiment and record their data. With the addition of telecommunications new discoveries can be spread quickly allowing more difficult questions to be answered. Apart from those doing research are those scientist who put these ideas into use.
The development of new technologies gives everyone a chance to put all that hard work in research to use. If you look around you now you could probably find many examples of this yourself. Even the computer your using right now is an amalgam of different theories and principles all put into use. Sometimes it’s easy to take all this for granted. You probably didn’t think about the principles of combustion when you started your car this morning, or the theories surrounding electricity when you turned on a light. The world around us is filled with scientific ideas and principles that allow us to easily accomplish tasks that would’ve taken weeks or months to accomplish only a century ago.
Perhaps the most exciting thing is that there is always more to come. Even now top notch research is being done on a variety of different principles that will once again change the world around us. So the next time you’re out for a drive thank science and the people behind it that made this world we live in possible, and never stop the pursuit of knowledge. The universe is still filled with many unanswered questions that are just waiting to be discovered.
