Edwin Newman Audio

Science & Discovery is a riveting presentation, in understandable language, of the ideas of three of history's significant scientific figures.

As optics improved, man began to see the solar system. Tycho Brahe in Denmark, Nicolaus Copernicus of Poland, Johannes Kepler of Germany, and Italy's Galileo all began to see a new relationship between the world and the stars

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists went beyond Aristotle's four elements (Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water) to catalogue nature's many basic elements.

Newtonian physics described a regular, clock-like world of forces and reaction; randomness was equated with incomplete knowledge.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published a vastly important work: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. For centuries, man had been seen as a created species, distinct from any other animal.

We think of science as a way of discovering certainty in an unpredictable world; experiments are designed to objectivity measure cause and effect.

Isaac Newton's world had operated in a fixed, rigid, "absolute" framework of space and time. Yet discoveries about electromagnetism in the late nineteenth century created new and troubling inconsistencies.

While astronomers charted the heavens, geographers and cartographers mapped the earth's exotic land and seas.

Newton was a natural philosopher (the word "scientist" had not yet been coined) who described a planetary system held together by gravitational forces.

Though medical science began with the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, dissection and the study of the human body was prohibited for religious reasons until the Renaissance.

Many believe the "Middle Ages" lacked progress, yet during this time algebra was developed, and Islamic scholars preserved and extended Greek thought (which otherwise was lost).

Alexander von Humboldt and other sparked a centuries-long debate about natural history and geological destiny by discussing what today we call the environment.

Einstein overthrew Newtonian physics but like Newton he still believed that physical events have definite causes. Then Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, joined others in describing a strange new world of uncertainty and mystery.

The story of the cosmos, its beginning and its changes through time, has been a topic of much speculation and myth. It also has attracted intense attention from scientists.

The scientific impulse can be said to have existed forever. But only with the written word did there emerge a record of speculations about how and why things happen.

In the 19th century, scientists working with chemistry and magnetism began discovering a rich variety of electrical phenomena.