As we approach the end of the second millennium stretching from the
beginning of the Christian era, among all the extraordinary changes that have
erupted in the twentieth century, none is more striking than the increasingly
pervasive influence of science and technology on contemporary life. New
discoveries and developments in every field from astronomy to zoology
heralded in our newspapers, journals, and television specials. Hardly any
aspect of life is left unaffected. There are rumblings of a resurgence of
religion, especially among the fundamentalist Protestants and Muslims, but
does anyone expect them to withstand the rationalizing, secularizing impact of
modern science? Fundamentalism is a ripple from the past, not a wave of the
future. Based on the authority of prophets, belief in revealed texts, worship
of savior-gods, and adherence to absolute values and sacred institutions, the
conservative nature of religions deeply rooted in the past make them
vulnerable to cultural and intellectual transformations, whereas science and
technology represent dynamic forces of change--cognitive and cultural, as well
as institutional. For this reason an understanding of how mankind---people on
this isolated but precious planet--came to develop scientific methods of
inquiry and theories of explanation is crucial if we are to understand the
challenges of the present and prospects for the future.

In this second volume, Copernicus through Quantum Mechanics, the
endeavor begun in the first, Theogony through Ptolemy, to discern and describe
"the origins and growth of scientific thought" will be continued. From the
archaic legacy of theogonic or mythopoetic cognition we have seen how the
Presocratic tradition of successive critical reflection, beginning in the sixth
century B.C. among the Milesians, led to a progressively more objective and
rational understanding of the astronomical realm, the terrestrial world, and of
man. These early reflections culminating in the remarkable cosmological
systems of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle by the fourth century B.C., then
evolved to a prototype of modern scientific inquiry among the Hellenistic
scientists of the third century associated with the fabled Museum of
Alexandria.

As argued previously, had this scientific tradition continued it undoubtedly
would have culminated in the belated scientific achievements of the
seventeenth century, the "age of genius" that created modern classical science.
For despite the critical analyses of Aristotle's astronomical system along with
his explanation of gravitational fall and projectile motion by Scholastics from
the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the predecessors explicitly mentioned
by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo (such as Philolaus, Heraclides, Aristarchus

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