| A | B |
|---|
| evidence | We should support a scientific idea based on the evidence, not based on the people who agree with it. |
| government and culture | Scientific progress depends not only on scientists, but also on government and culture. |
| previous scientists | Scientific progress occurs by building on the work of previous scientists. |
| Imhotep | In ancient times, people traveled for miles to visit Imhotep in Egypt, because he was renowned for his knowledge of medicine. |
| trial and error | Despite the fact that he could cure many ills, his medicine was based not on science, but on trial and error. |
| papyrus | Egyptian medicine was advanced by the invention of papyrus, which made recording information and passing it on from generation to generation much easier. |
| Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes | Three of the first scientists were Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, who were all from ancient Greece. |
| Thales | Thales studied the heavens and tried to develop a unifying theme that would explain the movements of the heavenly bodies. |
| Anaximander | Thales' pupil, Anaximander mainly studied life and was probably the first to attempt an explanation for the origin of the human race without reference to a creator. |
| Anaximenes | Anaximenes believed that all things were constructed of air, which led to one of the most important scientific ideas introduced by the Greeks: the concept of atoms. |
| Leucippus | Leucippus was a Greek scientist who is known as the father of atomic theory, but the works of his student, Democritus, are much better preserved. |
| Democritus | Built on his teacher’s foundation, and although most of his ideas about atoms were wrong, he was correct that atoms are in constant motion. |
| Aristotle | Aristotle is often called the father of the life sciences. |
| spontaneous generation | The idea that living organisms can be spontaneously formed from non- living substances |
| Ptolemy | best known for proposing the geocentric system of the heavens, where the earth is at the center of the universe and all other heavenly bodies orbit around it. |
| heliocentric system | the earth and other planets orbit the sun |
| Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo | Three scientists who played a huge role in giving us the heliocentric system |
| Galileo | collected much evidence in support of the heliocentric system using a telescope he built based on descriptions of a military device. He had to publicly renounce the system, however, for fear of being thrown out of his church. |
| alchemy | During the Dark ages, alchemy was done in place of science. In this pursuit, people tried to turn lead or other inexpensive items into gold or other valuable metals. These people were not scientists, because they worked strictly by trial and error. |
