Zach+-+Week+2

According to Dr. Hatch’s “History of Science,” the current level of scientific knowledge has come from thousands of years of advancement. Throughout this time frame, it seems as though the most popular subject for research was astronomy. Astronomy takes up a great deal of “History of Science” but it seems odd that this would in fact be the most studied science. Today, there are still many things that are unknown about the universe outside of Earth. While there are unknowns about practically every other science too, the unknowns in astronomy are very obvious. After such a long period of time, many of the other sciences have advanced far enough to make it seem as if everything has been learned about it. While this is clearly not true, there are not as many holes in other subjects. Everyone from the Greeks, to the Arabics, to the medieval scientists studied astronomy. The universe went from being known as geocentric to heliocentric and much more was learned. Today there is still question about whether the universe is expanding and whether life exists beyond. Sure there are theories that answer these questions that have a lot of support, but nobody knows for sure. To me it just seems that after so many thousands of years of being such a popular science, we would be further along in astronomy than we are. I also found the article “Counting in Babylon” very interesting as well. It made me really appreciate our number system as it really seems like such advancement over other methods. I never thought about how counting and keeping track of those numbers could be improved upon, but the current number system doesn’t allow for any of the confusion that the others did. To have 60 the same symbol as 1 seems incredibly confusing. Their numbers themselves were also much harder to read then the current numbers 1-9. The world today would be very different with the Babylon counting system and would have many problems.