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| 4. Science and Learning |
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(See Science and Technology)| Scientific inquiry continued to proceed along the general lines established during the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. With the development of positivism, the scientific method was used to explain a more diverse field of study, but overall it faced little questioning. | 1 |
| The major benchmarks in scientific inquiry included: | 2 |
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| a. Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy |
| 1799–1825 |
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| Pierre Laplace (1749–1827) published his Traité de mécanique céleste, in which he aimed at presenting analytically all of the developments in gravitational astronomy since the time of Newton. | 3 |
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| 1800 |
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| The Royal Institution of Great Britain, center for the diffusion of technical and scientific knowledge, was founded by the American Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) (1753–1814). | 4 |
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| 1801 |
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| Giuseppi Piazzi (1746–1826) discovered the first asteroid, Ceres; its orbit was computed by Gauss. | 5 |
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| 1801 |
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| Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) published Disquisitiones arithmeticae, developing the theory of congruences, quadratic forms, and quadratic residues, using methods and concepts basic to the subsequent progress of number theory and algebra. | 6 |
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| 1802 |
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| Thomas Young (1773–1829) demonstrated in his paper “On the Theory of Light and Colours” that the properties of light, including interference phenomena, are satisfactorily explained by considering light as a periodic wave motion in an ether. | 7 |
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| 1803–4 |
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| William Herschel (1738–1822) reported observations on six cases of double stars, and concluded that each was a binary or connected pair of stars in which each member influenced the motion of the other. This was the first observation of changes taking place under gravity beyond the solar system. | 8 |
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| 1809 |
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| Gauss expounded his new “least-squares” method of computing planetary orbits in Theoria motus corporum coelestium. | 9 |
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| 1815–21 |
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| Augustin Fresnel (1788–1827), through a series of mathematical and experimental researches on interference, diffraction, polarization, and double refraction, was able to establish the transverse wave theory of light. | 10 |
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| 1817 |
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| Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826), following the 1802 observations by William Wollaston (1766–1828) that the solar spectrum contains black lines, used an improved spectroscope and charted these lines, naming the principal ones. | 11 |
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| 1820 |
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| Hans Oersted (1777–1851) showed that a magnetic needle placed near a current-carrying wire deviated from its position, and that the direction of deviation depended on the direction of current flow. | 12 |
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