Science is knowledge of the world of nature. There are many regularities in nature that mankind had recognized and used for its survival since the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species. The Sun and the Moon periodically repeat their movements. Daily “motion” of the Sun as well as its annual “motion” correlate with important terrestrial events. Day and night provide the basic rhythm of human existence; the seasons determined the migration of animals upon which humans depended for millennia for survival. With the invention of agriculture, the seasons became even more crucial, to recognize the proper time for planting. Science defined as knowledge of natural processes has existed since the dawn of human existence.
Spiritual and divine forces were accepted as both real and necessary until the end of the 18th century and, in areas such as biology, deep into the 19th century as well. Thus the scientific discourse includes references to spiritual and divine forces.
Certain conventions governed the thinking regarding the God or the gods or to spirits. Gods and spirits, it was held, were themselves rational, or bound by rational principles, it was possible for humans to uncover the rational order of the world. Faith in the ultimate rationality of the creator or governor of the world has actually stimulated original scientific work by many. Kepler’s laws, Newton’s absolute space, and Einstein’s rejection of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics were all based on theological, not scientific, assumptions. For many, the ultimate intelligibility of nature has seemed to demand some rational guiding spirit.
Science, then, is to be considered as knowledge of natural regularities that is subjected to some degree of experimental rigour and explained by rational causes. Nature is known only through the senses. The invention of such instruments as the telescope, the microscope, and the Geiger counter has brought an ever-increasing range of phenomena within the scope of the senses. The progress of science is aided by these various instruments that increase the ability of man to sense.
Science, as explained above must have made its appearance before writing. It is necessary, therefore, to infer from archaeological remains what was the content of that science that was discovered before the age of writing. From cave paintings etc. it was concluded that prehistoric humans were close observers of nature who carefully tracked the seasons and times of the year. About 2500 bce there was a sudden burst of activity that seems to have had clear scientific importance. Great Britain and northwestern Europe contain large stone structures from that era (the most famous of which is Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England) that are remarkable from a scientific point of view. They reveal technical and social skills of a high order. Their layouts suggest a degree of mathematical sophistication. Stonehenge and other megalithic structures are apparently constructed on the basis of mathematical principles that includes knowledge of the famous Pythagorean theorem that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Now it can be said that this theorem, or at least the Pythagorean numbers that can be generated by it, are known throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Neolithic Europe two millennia before the birth of Pythagoras.
The combination of religion and astronomy was fundamental to the early history of science. The sky with the clearly discernible order and regularity of most bodies in it highlighted by extraordinary events such as comets and novae and the peculiar motions of the planets, obviously was an irresistible intellectual puzzle to early mankind. In its search for order and regularity, the human mind seized upon the sky and its bodies to develop the understanding of its working. Astronomy remained the queen of the sciences for the next 4,000 years (beginning with 2500 bce)
Hellenic Science
The first natural philosopher, according to Hellenic tradition, was Thales of Miletus, who flourished in the 6th century bce. He tried to explain all observed natural phenomena in terms of the changes of a single substance, water, which can be seen to exist in solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Thales advocated that the guarantee for the regularity and rationality of the world was the innate divinity in all things that directed them to their divinely appointed ends. This idea gave birth to two characteristics of classical Greek science. The first was the view of the universe as an ordered structure (the Greek kósmos means “order”). The second was the conviction that this order was not that of a mechanical contrivance but that of an organism; all parts of the universe had purposes in the overall scheme of things, and objects moved naturally toward the ends they were fated to serve. Thales' own disciple, Anaximander, was argued that water could not be the basic substance as dry things that are observed in the world cannot be produced from water. Thus, the birth of the critical tradition that is fundamental to the advance of science has started.
Various single substances were proposed and then rejected in the quest for the ultimate substance and then multiplicity of elements were proposed that could account for such opposite qualities as wet and dry, hot and cold. Two centuries after Thales, most natural philosophers accepted a doctrine of four elements: earth (cold and dry), fire (hot and dry), water (cold and wet), and air (hot and wet). All bodies were made from these four. The Indian tradition talks of five elements.
Entire History of Science
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https://archive.org/details/guidetohistoryof00sart
Euclid onwards
https://archive.org/details/ancientsciencean030375mbp
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/528771/history-of-science/29319/The-Middle-East
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