28. Read and translate the following text to learn about the origin of science. Origin of Science

Indeed, if one consults the archeological records, it seems clear that the Babylonian and Sumerian civilizations had rather more than rudimentary grasp of medicine, astronomy and applied mathematics, not to mention engineering.

From around the sixth century, however, we see signs in the ancient Greek world of what, perhaps, could be called scientific revolution. No longer satisfied with gods as the ultimate answer why the world is the way it is, Greek thinkers began to search for the underlying principle which would form the basis of a more satisfactory explanation. The great Thales, of Miletus proposed that the prime substance was water, Anaxagoras believed it to be air.

Democritus, astonishingly, proposed the first atomic theory – the word atom comes from the Greek ‘atomon’ literally translated as ‘indivisible’ (just how inappropriate the word was would not be recognized until demonstrated in spectacular fashion by Ernst Rutherford in the twentieth century). What we read in the works of these pre-Socratic philosophers is not recognizable science, but we see glimmerings of the scientific method in the rejection of ‘truth by authority’(«истина с разрешения»), and the search for causes and principles based on observation and reason, the truth as a province of thinkers, rather than priests.

With advent of Euclid and Archimedes, whose monumental works on geometry and trigonometry – among others – are still required reading on mathematical courses today, we find ourselves on the terra cognita of recognizable science.

Science has often come into conflict with organized religion, and on those occasions, the practitioners of science generally seem to come off worst, not least because the practitioners of religion seem all too eager to resort to threats, intimidation and even assassination, in order to avoid hearing opinions they do not agree with. At certain periods in history, established churches have been eager to detect the odor of heresy in scientific accounts of the cosmos, the origin and structure of the earth, and especially the scientific account of the origin of humanity.

However battered and bruised (потрёпанная и израненная) it may at times have been, at the end of the twentieth century science emerged as a victor, as the key intellectual discipline for the twenty first century and beyond. The whole laborious trial and error of the scientific process, the testing, revising; and discarding of hypothesis; the diligent construction of theories which fit the known facts, and modification or abandonment of these as and when new facts emerge; in short, the scientific method, produces results, results, which are testable, verifiable, falsifiable, and from which predictions can be made.

Astrology, chiromancy, divination, oneiromancy, parapsychology, telepathy, UFO-logy, ‘creation-science’, forecasting the weather from the entrails of sacrificial animals produce no such results. As it has been remarked elsewhere, those societies that have actively embraced the scientific method flourished.