Scientific Revolutions and Their Social Impacts

Course Objectives:

The aim of the course is to provide a timeline of mathematical and scientific discoveries together with an analysis of social climate during that period and their social impact. Examples will be selected from “revolutionary” events, that transformed the paradigm of the discipline.

Course Content:

The course will consist of 3 modules, in the areas of physics, mathematics, computer science and space science. Each module

will consist of 3 weeks of lectures and 1 week for student contributions. Last 2 weeks of the course will be devoted to student’s work on historical revolutionary scientific events/perspectives. The modules are as follows. In each module, selected events will be described in terms of their technical specifications, their contributions to the state of the art, the attitude of the society towards the topic/event before and after the impact of the given event.

Module 1: Physics: Mythical universes, geocentric system, heliocentric system, celestial mechanics, relativity theory.

Module 2: Mathematics: The evolution of number systems and the notion of infinity, “irrational numbers”, “imaginary numbers”, “solving the cubic”, “insolvability of the quintic”, “Xenon’s paradox”, “infinite series”.

Module 3: Computer and space sciences: Advances in computational tools: Napierian logarithm, computers, programming languages. Artificial intelligence. Space Science: Telescopes, spacecrafts, landing on the moon, landing on the Mars.