Archimedes, Pythagoras, Democritus. The history of science famously dates back to the brilliant minds of classical Greece. Another beginning is attributed to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, culminating in Isaac Newton’s discovery of order in the heavens, and the founding of the Royal Society in London.
For me, however, there was a much more fascinating reboot in the 1850s, when two near-simultaneous events changed the landscape for all time and transformed our understanding of what science is. These events were: (1) the new understanding of energy and its conservation; (2) Charles Darwin’s idea about evolution by natural selection.
These breakthroughs, arriving in the same decade, were important not just for themselves, but also because each brought together what had hitherto been seen as disparate disciplines. These were the two greatest unifying ideas of all time and this was when the process of convergence was first observed.
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