An history of ancient science in less than ten minutes

Well, you can’t really tell the history of ancient in science in just ten minutes.

There’s just too much of it.

Some truly colossal textbooks that cover a fraction of the period covered in this video – Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages – would take you weeks to read. (Or maybe days, if you’ve very fast.)

But you can drop a few names and point to key things they did.

(Ignore the title on the first slide; this video is part of a longer series, this first one covers up to the 12-13th century, not 1900.)

I hope is that this video might, in a small way, encourage some to learn more about the history of science.

I personally would have liked more explanation of what these characters did, and less name dropping, but that’d also make for a much longer video! And of course he leaves out a lot of people I’d have included… brevity has it’s limitations.

In later posts I will offer a small selection of books with some teasers as further encouragement. The history of science is littered with some pretty interesting characters.

I’d also like to offer some thoughts on why scientists and science writers should bother learn the history of science, but they’re for another day.

Other articles on Code for life:

Consumer brain-computer interface

When ideas have sex

Retrospective–The mythology of bioinformatics

Forgetting older science

Observing neurons and 1960s sci-fi geeks