Science Sheet

This fact sheet will provide you with some insights into Science, whether it is what Science is, what are the milestones of Science, or some statistics about Science.

Definitions of Science

  1. All knowledge acquired through study or practice
  1. Form of knowledge based on logic, experimental method and the search for theoretical explanations to phenomena.

To simplify, in its first sense: science = knowledge, in all subjects. In its second sense: science = knowledge by means of logical arguments, of scientific subjects: math, physics, chemistry, etc.

History of Science:

– 460 → -377: Hippocrates writes the medical oath

Fourth century BC – Herodotus develops historical science

-240 – Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the Earth

-212 – Death of Archimedes

13th century AD – First universities

1437 – Gutenberg invents the printing press

1543 – Nicolas Copernicus: the Sun is the center of the celestial orbs

1609 – Johannes Kepler: Astronomia Nova, states the first two laws of planetary motion

1633 – Galileo trial

1637 – René Descartes: the 3 essays of the Discourse of the Method

1642 – Blaise Pascal: calculating machine

1662 – Robert Boyle: law of perfect gases

1672 – Isaac Newton: parabolic mirror telescope

1687 – Isaac Newton: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

1714 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit: mercury thermometer

1751 → 1772 – Jean Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot : the Encyclopedia

1781 – First artificial insemination on a bitch by Abbé Spallanzani

1813-1878 – Claude Bernard develops experimental laboratory medicine

1826 – Birth of linguistics

1839 – Auguste Comte – launches the concept of sociology

1859 – Charles Darwin: Origin of species

1885 – Louis Pasteur: rabies vaccine

1895 – Emile Durkheim – publishes The Rules of Sociological Method

1896 – Sigmund Freud and Breuer – publication of Studies on Hysteria – Sigmund Freud develops psychoanalysis

1915 – Albert Einstein: General Relativity

1945 – Atomic bomb

1947 – George Gamow: Big Bang Theory

1953 – Watson and Crick: discovery of DNA

1978 – First test tube baby: Louise Brown

1997 – Cloning of Dolly the sheep

2001 – The map of the human genome is completed, making it possible to detect hereditary diseases from the embryo

Science StatisticsIn

2022, the budget of the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation was 24.6 billion euros (in a post-COVID recovery context).

This budget is the fourth largest of the French government (behind the National Education, the Armed Forces, and the Ecological Transition).

According to a UNESCO report, there were 8,854 million researchers in the world in 2018. A third of them live in East Asia or South-East Asia (37.6%). They are a quarter living in Europe (23.5%), and a fifth in North America (18. 1%).

General Knowledge: science

→ Tocqueville – Analysis of the link between democracy and the study of science