Natural science

Natural science appeared more than 3,000 years ago. Then there was no division into physics , chemistry , biology , geography and astronomy . The philosophers were engaged in sciences. With the development of trade and navigation , the development of geography and astronomy , necessary for navigation , began, and with the development of technology , the development of physics and chemistry .

The origin of the natural sciences is connected with the application of philosophical naturalism to scientific research . The principles of naturalism require the study and use of the laws of nature, without introducing into them the laws introduced by man, that is, excluding the arbitrariness of human will.

During the late Middle Ages (XIV-XV centuries), the basic concepts of the ancient natural science picture of the world are gradually being revised and the prerequisites are being created for creating a new natural science, new physics, new astronomy , and the emergence of scientific biology. Such a review is based, on the one hand, on strengthening the critical attitude towards Aristotelism , and on the other hand, on difficulties in resolving the contradictions that the scholasticism has encountered in a logical, rational interpretation of the main religious principles and dogmas .

One of the main contradictions, the attempts to resolve which pushed medieval scholastic thought to “destroy” the old natural-scientific picture of the world , consisted in the following: how to combine the Aristotelian idea of ​​a closed space with the Christian idea of ​​the infinity of divine omnipotence? References to the omnipotence of God among the medieval scholastics served as the basis for abandoning a number of key Aristotelian ideas and developing qualitatively new images and ideas that subsequently contributed to the formation of the prerequisites for a new mechanistic picture of the world. The following can be attributed to such qualitatively new ideas and images:

• the assumption of the existence of emptiness, but not yet abstract, but only as intangible spatiality, permeated by divinity (since God is not only omnipotent, but also omnipresent, as the scholastics believed).
• the attitude to the problem of the infinity of nature is changing. The infinity of nature is increasingly seen as a positive, permissible and very desirable (in terms of religious values) beginning. Such a beginning, as it were, showed such an attributive characteristic of God as his omnipotence.
• as a consequence of the image of infinite space, the idea of ​​infinite rectilinear motion arises.
• the idea arises of the possibility of the existence of an infinitely large body. The image of spatial infinity gradually grows into the image of material-bodily infinity. At the same time, they reasoned something like this: “God can create everything in which there is no contradiction; there is no contradiction in the assumption of an infinitely large body; that means God can create it. ”
• more and more often, the existence among the movements of celestial bodies was allowed not only ideal (uniform, circumferential), commensurable among themselves, but also incommensurable. Irrationality was carried from the earthly world to the supra-divine world. This transference saw signs of God's creative power: God is able to create new things everywhere and always. On this path, the fundamental Aristotelian distinction between the celestial and the earthly worlds was removed and the prerequisites for the integration of physics, astronomy and mathematics were laid.

Qualitative shifts have occurred both in kinematics and in dynamics . In kinematics, medieval scholastics introduce the concepts of " average speed " and " instantaneous speed ", " uniformly accelerated movement " (they called it uniform-differential). They define the instantaneous speed at a given moment as the speed with which the body would move if from that moment in time its movement became uniform. And, in addition, the concept of acceleration is gradually maturing.

In the era of the late Middle Ages, the dynamic “ theory of impetus ” was significantly developed, which was a bridge connecting the dynamics of Aristotle with the dynamics of Galileo . Jean Buridan (XIV century) explained from the point of view of the theory of impetus the fall of bodies. He believed that when the bodies fall, heaviness imprints “impetus” in the falling body, and therefore its speed increases all the time. The magnitude of impetus, in his opinion, is determined by both the speed communicated to the body and the “quality of matter” of this body. Impetus is expended during movement to overcome friction , and when the impetus is wasted, the body stops.

Aristotle considered the distance to the end point, and not the distance from the starting point of movement, to be the main parameter for any moment of movement. Thanks to the theory of impetus, the attention of research thought was gradually shifted to the distance of the moving body from the beginning of the movement: the body falling under the influence of the impetus accumulates it more and more as it moves away from the starting point. On this path, prerequisites were formed for the transition from the concept of impetus to the concept of inertia . All this gradually prepared the emergence of the dynamics of Galileo .

A time interval from the date of publication of the work of Nikolai Copernicus “ On the Reversals of the Celestial Spheres ” (De Revolutionibus), that is, from 1543 until the work of Isaac Newton , whose work “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ” was published in 1687, is usually called the period “ scientific revolution ” ^[3] .

Prior to this, knowledge obtained by pure logic was considered to be true and universal. The main method of cognition was deduction . The knowledge coming from observation was considered partial, not having universal reality. The inductive method — a conclusion about the general from private observations — took root only very gradually ^[4] . Starting from Copernicus, the main method of scientific research was observing nature and conducting experiments . Today it is called the “empirical method." For us, it is now natural, but it was recognized only in the 17th century, and spread only in the 18th century ^[5] .

The theoretical justification for the new scientific methodology belongs to Francis Bacon , who substantiated in his “ New Organon ” the transition from the traditional deductive approach (from the general - speculative assumption or authoritative judgment - to the particular, that is, to the fact) to the inductive approach (from the particular - empirical fact - to general, that is, to regularity). The advent of Descartes' systems and especially Newton - the latter was entirely built on experimental knowledge - marked the final break of the "umbilical cord", which connected the emerging science of modern times with the ancient medieval tradition. The publication in 1687 of the “ Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ” was the culmination of a scientific revolution and generated an unprecedented surge in interest in scientific publications in Western Europe. Among other scientists of this period, Brahe , Kepler , Halley , Brown , Hobbes , Harvey , Boyle , Hook , Huygens , Leibniz , Pascal made an outstanding contribution to the scientific revolution.

Schools of natural science of the 18th-19th centuries shared on the relationship of the current forces of nature (mainly geological and biological factors) with the forces of the past:

• Catastrophism
• Uniformity
• Evolutionism

They differed in terms of kind (factors), energy (strength) and speed (pace) of forces acting earlier and now. They have a different attitude to the principle of uniformity, continuity, and the summation of small deviations for a long time ^[6] .

The fundamental sciences that arose from natural science: physics , chemistry , biology , astronomy , geography , geology . Then, such sciences as geophysics , astrophysics , biophysics , biochemistry , physical chemistry , chemical physics , geochemistry , meteorology , climatology , soil science appeared at the intersections of these sciences. In addition, formed, such as agrochemistry , ecology , chemical technology , mining , etc.

Mathematics is combined with logic in the complex of formal sciences and is not included in the natural sciences, since their methodology is significantly different from the methodology of the natural sciences. For the same reason, most of modern computer science can hardly be attributed to the natural sciences. Studies on information processing in nature, the brain and society are highlighted in a special section of natural informatics ^{[7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]} .

In the 1920s and 1940s, natural science was a separate subject in a secondary school in the USSR. Then the subject was renamed into natural science .

• Natural History: Dictionary / Authors: Yu. V. Egorov, L. N. Arkavenko, O. A. Osipova, Yekaterinburg: Sokrat Publishing House, 2004
• Concepts and hypotheses of natural science: a training manual / S. V. Slinkin , E. F. Sadykova. - Tobolsk, 2006 .-- 289 p. - ISBN 5-85944-200-9
• Folta J., Nowy L. History of Natural History in Dates: A Chronological Review = Jaroslav Folta, Luboš Nový. Dejiny prirodných vied v dátach. Chronologický prehlad. - Bratislava, Smena, 1981 / Per. from the Slovak. Ph.D. Z. E. Gelman; Foreword and commonly. ed. Doctor of Chemistry A.N. Shamina . - M .: Progress , 1987 .-- 496 p. - 23,000 copies. (per.)
• Gaiduk G.V. Preclassical science of Eastern Europe at the end of the XV - the middle of the XVIII centuries. - Minsk: FUAinform, 2010. - 416, [30] p. - 400 copies. - ISBN 978-985-6868-45-3 . (per.)
• Natural History // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.