Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna

Hippocrates (b.460BC) started the foundation of Greek medicine, and Galen (b.129AD) formalized the science of medicine. Most of Galen's works were translated into Arabic in the ninth century in Baghdad. Avicenna(Ibn-Sina, b.980 AD) practised medicine in Persia and wrote the 'Cannon of Medicine" in Arabic, the lingua franca of the Abbasid empire.

The School of Athens.....

Claudius Ptolemy(b.85AD in Alexandria) shown in The Scool of Athens. Ptolemy's book "Almagest" was the source book of astronomy until the Copernican Revolution in the fifteenth century. Almagest was the Arabic translation of the original "Mathematike Syntaxis" of Ptolemy, meaning the Great Book.

The School of Athens......

Pythagoras(b.569BC in Samos of Ionia) is seen in the foreground and to the left in The Scool of Athens. Ionia(next to Turkey) produced the early thinkers(before Aristotle and Plato)in the development of natural science.

The School of Athens........

In the foreground and to the right in the School of Athens, Euclid(b. 325 BC in Alexandria) is measuring on a board. Euclid's "Elements" is the foundation of geometry, logic and deductive reasoning.

The School of Athens

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The School of Athens
Raphael,1509, Fresco
Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican


The main figures in The School of Athens are Plato and Aristotle engaged in a dialogue in the center of the fresco. Plato is holding a copy of Timaeus, and Aristotle a copy of Ethics. Plato is pointing to the heavens in the search of the ideal, and Aristotle is pointing to the Earth looking for answers in nature.

Development of science

My photo essays in the past included our planet and the progress of writing and communications. I have always been interested in the visual arts and photography, and I think that communicating with the image helps to understand the subject matter better.
In the next section I will try to describe the history and the development of science from its early days in Athens to the present time. This may be of interest, since some people still have difficulty reconciling science with scripture.

Internet, the World Wide Web and the computer changed the way we do business, work, and communicate. Formal knowledge started in Athens before the time of Christ, then it moved to Alexandria Egypt in the early centuries AD, then to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in the 9th and 10th century AD , and then to Europe before the Renaissance period. And now major libraries in the United States are planning to put all of their books on line.

Personal computers and the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee.
IBM introduced the first Personal Computer in1981, andTim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing in 1989.
This happened at CERN, the European research Center for Elementary particles.
HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) was used to write the web documents, HTTP(Hypertext Transfer Protocol) was used to transmit the pages, and a web browser to interpret and display results on any computer.

Computers, communications and information

Computers, information and communication. In 1948 Claude Shannon a scientist at The Bell Laboratories wrote his opus major "A Mathematical Theory of Communications". This book compares to Euclid's elements, or Newton's Principia in that it formalized the science of information and communication.

Television came after cinema in black and white and small screens. Color, stereo and larger screens came later, and now high defenition TV. 

Cinema followed photography

First movies were silent and in black and white. Then came sound and color, and then wide screen and stereo sound. Early film was based on cellulose nitrate which was extremely fllamable, but soon plastics replaced the old film.