First scientific break through

Well... I honestly don't know if this should be here or in the history subtopics.

Basically, what do you think was the first scientific breakthrough to shape mankind? And i mean discoveries like in the cave men era that mad eus different from animals.

I personally think that the discovery and ability to create fire was he most significant.

And the wheel falls closely behind

Okay from here on in, the definition of invention or discovery has to be something more advanced than basic tools, monkeys use basic tools. Not to be rascist towards monkeys, but this is about humans inventing things unique that no other species can, or has.

And theories don't count, like newtons law of gravity, or theory of relativity, because those have existed forever and will always exist, unless of course they are proven wrong.

 

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I'd say different methods of irrigation are just as important as the wheel or fire.

 

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Thats a good point....

 

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The concept of the atom, the indivisible unit of matter. Fire and the wheel are technological but not scientific.

 

the use of tools.

 

All things are scientific.

The atom is destroyable for energy, maybe not "divisible" like the butter on your table.

 

Then I could argue that rouge is the greatest scientific accomplishment.

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Or bread. Or Maltese dogs. It's ALL SCIENTIFIC!

And this guy started experimental medicine, which I consider the first scientific breakthrough that I can get excited about.

 

Scientists still search for that unit, having found that atoms are divisible. The concept of an indivisible unit of matter/energy is now referred to as the a-tom.

 

Wait would we call inventions and ideas before the creation of the scientific method as science. And inventions them selves are not science really they are engineering breakthroughs.

 

Agreed, and I personally would imagine that fire and the wheel were empiricism/ trial and error rather than science.

 

I just figure some homo erectus got curious, and then figured it was some kind of beast that could be befriend. And I figure the wheel simply evolved from rolling logs.

 

In terms of discovery, I'd tend to agree that fire was more accidental than an invention. Serendipidy must have of neccesity played an enormously important role in early human or hominid development--even now it plays a role in science--so it's hard to say where you shade over from lucky chance to a specific intention to invent something new, or adapt something you already have in order to make it better. I suggest the possibility that when people first discovered that if you had a hot enough fire, you could melt sand and create a liquid that cooled to produce a hard but brittle solid--or that metals could be melted out of rocks--but these discoveries must have been made dozens of times by different groups of people before someone came up with the notion of making a bottle, or shaping that lump of cooled metal into something either useful or beautiful. The Copper Age goes back to only about 5000 BC at the earliest, and before that everyone used stone. Now in that sense the earliest industry, where people actually set out to produce something useful, would be flint-knapping, possibly as early as 2 million years ago--I'm not certain when the Old Stone Age started.

 

Language and Writing, without which the rest would not be possible.

 

Not scientific, but cultural, almost biological. We are talking about investigations into the nature of the world, not inventions. People always get technology confused with science.

 

I will agree with SAM. (I'm a little bias as a fix-it guy) It was the use of tools that led to the discovery of fire and the wheel. It all started with some dude picking up a stick and hitting something with it.

 

That's also technology. The Greeks invented the first science, although the scientific method came much later.

 

I'd disagree with you for the Chinese have writtings that pre date the Greeks by a thousand years inventing all sorts of stuff from gunpowder to rudders.

 

I always remember that famous scene in 2001 where the ape-man picks up a femur-bone and smashes in the head of his enemy--and from then on you get a long sequence of animals getting done in--finally the bone flies up into the air and turns into a spaceship; and we leap five million years into the 21st Century...

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penisillin?

CPR (the early expermints into it may have been incorect for various reasons but they did work, just not nessarly on what we would count as dead)

 

I guess one could argue that, although the examples you present are also not science, but technology.