10. Text 1. Skim the text and point out the main sources of modern science development.
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Modern science and technology by Jean-Jacques Salomon It has been said that all the old scientific movements of all the different civilizations were rivers flowing into the ocean of "modern" science. Modern science has its roots in a past that is extremely diverse in both time and space, ranging from the earliest civilizations of Asia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, to the "Greek miracle," through the Judeo-Christian, Arab, and scholastic traditions. However, science as we understand the term is a relatively recent phenomenon. A major advance occurred in the seventeenth century, an advance so different from all previous ones that it can be called an unprecedented "intellectual revolution." Gaston Bachelard has labelled it an epistemological breakthrough and Thomas Kuhn - a paradigm shift. Either way, this turning-point was of even greater historical significance because it began in Europe and developed almost exclusively there for several centuries. The economic and social transformations coming in the wake of the invention of printing and the enormous stimulus to curiosity provided by the "great discoveries" and accompanying this scientific revolution helped to ensure, strengthen, and speed up the expansion of Western civilization relative to all the others. It is not surprising that the history of Western science has often been written as a history of conquest, and oversimplified in such a way that science has featured as an agent of European colonialism or as a residual feature of post-colonial imperialism. Yet history is no less complicated than is the concept of a scientific revolution. Modern science did not happen in a single day - it took time to make an impact on people's thinking and on institutions, with added difficulties because, when experimental 11 science started, most facts were still so uncertain that speculation had a field day. Furthermore, some of the most innovative thinkers (such as Kepler and Newton) in many respects belonged to the old order, half in the modern era through their radical contributions to astronomy, but half in the past because of their links with hermetics, mysticism, or astrology. In a system of thought that had not freed itself from alchemy nor from the bookish tradition handed down from Aristotle, the spread of new ideas was hindered by strong resistance, resulting from a combination of prejudice, dogma, and habits. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century has generated a huge literature, which is constantly being reinterpreted and reassessed. "Nature is expressed in mathematics": Galileo's famous phrase appeared in his Saggiatore in 1623; it marks symbolically the break with the ancient notion of Nature as an ensemble of substances, forms, and qualities and suggests instead a completely different conception in terms of quantitative phenomena that can by definition be measured and therefore potentially controlled. This "intellectual reform" led not only to the transformation of science - which gradually developed into a range of many and varied sciences, each of them in turn splitting up into more and more specialized subdisciplines - but also to one of perceptions, structures, and institutions. The break between arts and crafts and science reflected a break in the social order and hence a class distinction; technology, until then reserved for the "servile class", becomes the indispensable collaborator of speculative science, which had been reserved for the "professional class." This nearing of theory and practice is a revolutionary turn at both the intellectual and the social level. For the old saying, "to know is to contemplate," a new one was substituted: "to know is to act, to manipulate, to transform" - knowledge is power, in Bacon's phrase. And by the same token, the technician's know-how is to be closely associated with the scientist's theoretical way of thinking and doing. The process of the creation, expansion, consolidation, and success of modern science has had three distinct phases: institutionalization, professionalization, and industrialization. In all the industrialized countries these phases occurred in the same historical sequence and took several centuries, whereas in the developing countries - most of which became nations only very recently - they have often occurred in a different order, with professionalization starting before institutionalization, or even industrialization before professionalization. The problems of the scientific and technological systems in many of these countries, like the lack of social recognition of their scientists and research institutions, can often be largely attributed to this hasty development, which frequently occurs without the benefit of any previous scientific tradition and within a few decades in circumstances very different from those of the industrialized countries.
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