Goodbye to the millennium

2000/12/01 Roa Zubia, Guillermo - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Historia

All these questions are useless. It is also almost impossible to predict what will happen in the next fifty years. The advice of prestigious scientists is nothing more than to continue working, since the renovation brings incredible surprises. For example, at a conference Pedro Etxenike briefly gave us the chronicle of the last hundred years. The trip to the Moon, the atomic bomb, genetic engineering or the mobile phone could not smell the XIX either. At the end of the 20th century. But we are not surprised. The same thing happens to us.

A thousand years ago, the change is even more surprising. And the concept of science has developed in this millennium that is about to end. It cannot be denied that this is a field invented by the Greeks of antiquity, but until about five centuries ago it was at the hand of philosophy. Scientific method XVII. It was not defined until the 20th century. In addition, the essential connection between science and technology that we consider common today is only one hundred years old. Each of them followed their path and occasionally joined together, but there was no total dependence.

A thousand years ago, the most advanced countries in science were Muslims and for a couple of centuries it was so. For example, it highlights the work of the Persian Abdulla Ibn Sina (980-1037), known in the West as Avizena. Europe was immersed in the dark Middle Ages, so the contributions of the East are strange to us.

The Renaissance was a new clarity. Technological innovations were important. Perhaps the most prominent is the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468). This invention guided modern history. The physicists Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) succeeded in separating Aristotle's philosophy and science and laid the foundations of scientific thought.

In the last three centuries of the millennium the lists of names and branches of science have skyrocketed. Today research is the monopoly of territories considered the first world. But the next thousand years can change the situation a lot. Perhaps the concept of science is totally obsolete, but who knows.

At the moment we will have to work without just looking at the change of date. Let us look only at the reader to wish him a new year.