[background music playing]
Welcome to History of Science from Antiquity
to the Age of Newton at the University of
Oklahoma. History is about stories, and science
is a story of people from a dozen ancient
civilizations. Come with me on a journey,
a time-traveling tour spanning nearly 5 millennia.
We'll see how, from the ziggurats of ancient
Babylon, astronomers created the science of
mathematical astronomy, predicting the positions
of the planets centuries into the future.
The star maps of Ancient Egypt tell a story
as cryptic as the hieroglyphs Europeans struggled
for centuries to decipher.
The glory of Ancient Greece shines through
the geometry of Euclid, and the pages of the
works of Aristotle. The grandeur of Rome appears
in the search for the laws of nature, in the
heavens above as on earth below. The heritage
of the Islamic world transformed every field
of science, from astronomy to medicine.
The European Middle Ages offered an age of
illumination, an age of faith and reason.
The Western hemisphere produced an explosion
of new knowledge of plants and animals. Renaissance
and Reformation Europe brought new attitudes
toward the human body and the place of the
Sun in the cosmos as a lamp in the center
of the temple.
Knowledge circulated from India, China, and
Japan and back again.
In each place and time, we will seek to understand
how people saw their world: What is nature?
How is nature known? Answers to these questions
varied over time and between different cultures.
Modern science developed from interactions
between all of these civilizations. The story
of science is one of the major human dramas.
I'm your professor, Kerry Magruder, Curator
of the History of Science Collections, University
of Oklahoma Libraries. It's my privilege to
be your guide on this tour through the history
of science. Join me on this wide-ranging journey
from Antiquity to the Age of Newton.
[music ends]
