Time In Physics ... Markers of time Before there were clocks, time was measured by those physical processes which were understandable to each epoch of civilization: the first appearance (see: heliacal rising) of Sirius to mark the flooding of the Nile each year the periodic succession of night and day, one after the other, in seemingly eternal succession the position on the horizon of the first appearance of the sun at dawn the position of the sun in the sky the marking of the moment of noontime during the day the length of the shadow cast by a gnomon Eventually, it became possible to characterize the passage of time with instrumentation, using operational definitions. Simultaneously, our conception of time has evolved, as shown below...
History Of Mathematics ... Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales. The most ancient mathematical texts available are Plimpton 322 (Babylonian mathematics c...
Outline Of Physics ... Note: the Theory column below contains links to articles with infoboxes at the top of their respective pages which list the major concepts...
Traditional Chinese Medicine ... The doctrines of Chinese medicine are rooted in books such as the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon and the Treatise on Cold Damage, as well as in cosmological notions like yin-yang and the Five Phases. Starting in the 1950s, these precepts were modernized in the People's Republic of China so as to integrate many anatomical and pathological notions from scientific medicine...
Scientific Community ... Communication between the members is established by disseminating research work and hypotheses through articles in peer reviewed journals, or by attending conferences where new research is presented and ideas exchanged and discussed... Scientific consensus is of such importance to science pedagogy, the evaluation of new ideas, and research funding that critics of the consensus often bitterly complain that there is a closed shop bias within the scientific community toward new ideas (see articles on protoscience, fringe science, and pseudoscience)...
Existence Of God ... The debate concerning the existence of God raises many philosophical issues. A basic problem is the existence of both monotheistic and polytheistic views...
Philosophy Of Logic ... This article outlines issues in philosophy of logic or provides links to relevant articles or both...
Social Science ... Chemistry Acid-base reaction theories · Alchemy Analytical chemistry · Astrochemistry Biochemistry · Crystallography Environmental chemistry · Food science Geochemistry · Green chemistry Inorganic chemistry · Materials science Molecular physics · Nuclear chemistry Organic chemistry · Photochemistry Physical chemistry · Radiochemistry Solid-state chemistry · Stereochemistry Supramolecular chemistry Surface science · Theoretical chemistry Astronomy Astrophysics · Cosmology Galactic astronomy · Planetary geology Planetary science · Stellar astronomy. ...
History Of Philosophy ... All cultures — be they prehistoric, medieval, or modern; Eastern, Western, religious or secular — have had their own unique schools of philosophy, arrived at through both inheritance and through independent discovery. Such theories have grown from different premises and approaches, examples of which include (but are not limited to) rationalism (theories arrived at through logic), empiricism (theories arrived at through observation), and even through leaps of faith, hope and inheritance (such as the supernaturalist philosophies and religions)...
Scientific Misconduct ... In some cases, scientific misconduct may also constitute violations of the law, but not always. Being accused of the activities described in this article is a serious matter for a practicing scientist, with severe consequences should it be determined that a researcher intentionally or carelessly engaged in misconduct...
Tax ... A tax may be defined as a "pecuniary burden laid upon individuals or property owners to support the government a payment exacted by legislative authority." A tax "is not a voluntary payment or donation, but an enforced contribution, exacted pursuant to legislative authority" and is "any contribution imposed by government whether under the name of toll, tribute, tallage, gabel, impost, duty, custom, excise, subsidy, aid, supply, or other name." Overview The legal definition and the economic definition of taxes differ in that economists do not consider many transfers to governments to be taxes. For example, some transfers to the public sector are comparable to prices...
Scientific Literature ... Articles are usually prepared at the end of a project, or at the end of components of a particularly large one... The first part is normally an abstract; this is a one-paragraph summary of the work, and is intended to serve as a guide for determining if the articles is pertinent, and to furnish subject metadata for indexing services...
Outline Of Cell Biology ... This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level. Cell biology research extends to both the great diversity of single-celled organisms like bacteria and the many specialized cells in multicellular organisms like humans...
Article (publishing) ... The writer can use redirection to ensure that the reader keeps reading the article and to draw her attention to other articles...
Madrasah ... However, in English, the term madrasah usually refers to the specifically Islamic institutions. A typical Islamic school usually offers two courses of study: a ḥifẓ course teaching memorization of the Qur'an (the person who commits the entire Qur'an to memory is called a ḥāfiẓ); and an ʿālim course leading the candidate to become an accepted scholar in the community...
Outline Of Mathematics ... Reference databases Mathematical Reviews – journal and online database published by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) that contains brief synopses (and occasionally evaluations) of many articles in mathematics, statistics and theoretical computer science... Zentralblatt MATH – service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, published by Springer Science+Business Media...
Treaties Of The European Union ... There are two core functional treaties that lay out how the EU operates and a number of satellite treaties which are interconnected with them. The treaties have been repeatedly amended by other treaties over the 60 years since they first began...
Further Reading: Writing
Creative Writing ... Though they have their own programs of study in the fields of film and theatre, screenwriting and playwriting have become more popular in creative writing programs, as creative writing programs attempt to work more closely with film and theatre programs as well as English programs... Creative writing students are encouraged to get involved in extracurricular writing-based activities, such as publishing clubs, school-based literary magazines or newspapers, writing contests, writing colonies or conventions, and extended education classes... In the UK, the Arvon Foundation runs week long residential creative writing courses in four historic houses...
Writing ... Writing most likely began as a consequence of political expansion in ancient cultures, which needed reliable means for transmitting information, maintaining financial accounts, keeping historical records, and similar activities... Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form... In both Ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica writing may have evolved through calendrics and a political necessity for recording historical and environmental events...
Bookbinding ... The craft of bookbinding may have originated in India, where religious sutras were copied on to palm leaves (cut into two, lengthwise) with a metal stylus. The leaf was then dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain in the wound...
Biology ... Although biology in its modern form is a relatively recent development, sciences related to and included within it have been studied since ancient times. Natural philosophy was studied as early as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indian subcontinent, and China...
Creativity ... Scholarly interest in creativity ranges widely: Topics to which it is relevant include the relationship between creativity and general intelligence; the mental and neurological processes associated with creative activity; the relationship between personality type and creative ability; the relationship between creativity and mental health; the potential for fostering creativity through education and training, especially as augmented by technology; and the application of an individual's existing creative resources to improve the effectiveness of learning processes and of the teaching processes tailored to them. Creativity and creative acts are therefore studied across several disciplines - psychology, cognitive science, education, philosophy (particularly philosophy of science), technology, theology, sociology, linguistics, business studies, and economics...
Alchemy ... It is a popular belief that alchemists made contributions to the "chemical" industries of the day—ore testing and refining, metalworking, production of gunpowder, ink, dyes, paints, cosmetics, leather tanning, ceramics, glass manufacture, preparation of extracts, liquors, and so on (it seems that the preparation of aqua vitae, the "water of life", was a fairly popular "experiment" among European alchemists). Alchemists contributed distillation to Western Europe...
History Of Books ... Papyrus After extracting the marrow from the stems, a series of steps (humidification, pressing, drying, gluing, and cutting), produced media of variable quality, the best being used for sacred writing... In Ancient Egypt, papyrus was used for writing maybe as early as from First Dynasty, but first evidence is from the account books of King Neferirkare Kakai of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2400 BC)... The script of Egyptian scribes was called hieratic, or sacredotal writing; it is not hieroglyphic, but a simplified form more adapted to manuscript writing (hieroglyphs usually being engraved or painted)...
Indus Script ... In the early 1970s, Iravatham Mahadevan published a corpus and concordance of Indus writing listing about 3700 seals and about 417 distinct signs in specific patterns...
Women In Science ... The study of natural philosophy in ancient Greece was open to women. Recorded examples include Aglaonike, who predicted eclipses; and Theano, mathematician and physician, who was a pupil (possibly also wife) of Pythagoras, and one of a school in Crotone founded by Pythagoras, which included many other women...
Historical Method ... The tradition should be supported by an unbroken series of witnesses, reaching from the immediate and first reporter of the fact to the living mediate witness from whom we take it up, or to the one who was the first to commit it to writing...
Mathematical Notation ... Those properties might then be expressed by some well-known and agreed-upon symbols from a table of mathematical symbols. This mathematical notation might include annotation such as "All x", "No x", "There is an x" (or its equivalent, "Some x"), "A set", "A function" "A mapping from the real numbers to the complex numbers" In different contexts, the same symbol or notation can be used to represent different concepts...
History Of Science In Early Cultures ... Astronomy is a science that lends itself to the recording and study of observations: the vigorous notings of the motions of the stars, planets, and the moon are left on thousands of clay tablets created by scribes. Even today, astronomical periods identified by Mesopotamian scientists are still widely used in Western calendars: the solar year, the lunar month, the seven-day week...
Theory Of The Firm ... The need for a revised theory of the firm was emphasized by empirical studies by Berle and Means, who made it clear that ownership of a typical American corporation is spread over a wide number of shareholders, leaving control in the hands of managers who own very little equity themselves. Hall and Hitch found that executives made decisions by rule of thumb rather than in the marginalist way...
Manuscript ... Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations...
Power Of Attorney ... Oral and written powers of attorney Depending on the jurisdiction, a power of attorney may be oral and whether witnessed or not, will hold up in court, the same as if it were in writing... Many institutions, such as hospitals, banks and, in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service, require a power of attorney to be in writing before they will honor it, and they will usually keep an original copy for their records... This means, for example, that if a principal authorizes someone to sell the principal's house or other real property, and the law requires a contract for the sale of real property to be in writing (which is required under the Statute of Frauds in most U. S...
Incunable ... The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in a Latin pamphlet by Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, De ortu et progressu artis typographicae ("Of the rise and progress of the typographic art", Cologne, 1639), which includes the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first infancy of printing", a term to which he arbitrarily set an end, 1500, which still stands as a convention. The term came to denote the printed books themselves in the late seventeenth century...
Codex ... Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement of the scroll, the dominant form of book in the ancient world, has been termed the most important advance in the history of the book prior to the invention of printing... The codex holds considerable practical advantages over other book formats, such as compactness, sturdiness, ease of reference (a codex is random access, as opposed to a scroll, which is sequential access), and especially economy; unlike the scroll, both recto and verso could be used for writing... Although the change from rolls to codices roughly coincides with the transition from papyrus to parchment as favourite writing material, the two developments are quite unconnected...
Linear A ... Though the two scripts – Linear A and B – share some of the same symbols, using the syllables associated with Linear B in Linear A writings produces words that are unrelated to any known language. This language has been dubbed Minoan and corresponds to a period in Cretan history prior to a series of invasions by Mycenaean Greeks around 1450 BC...
Scientific Method ... The chief characteristic which distinguishes a scientific method of inquiry from other methods of acquiring knowledge is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself, and contradict their theories about it when those theories are incorrect, i. e., falsifiability...
Elisha Gray ... Gray is also considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer, and was granted over 70 patents for his inventions. Biography and early inventions Born into a Quaker family in Barnesville, Ohio, Gray was brought up on a farm...
Anthropology ... Anthropology's basic concerns are the definition of human life and origin, how social relations among humans are organized, who the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens are, what the characterizations of human physical traits are, how humans behave, why there are variations among different groups of humans, how the evolutionary past of Homo sapiens has influenced its social organization and culture and so forth. In the United States, contemporary anthropology is typically divided into four sub-fields: cultural anthropology also known as socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and physical (or biological) anthropology...
History Of Science ... According to Kuhn each new paradigm re-writes the history of its science to present by selection and distortions the former paradigm as its forerunner. The description of the history of economic theory below is a good example...
Botany ... Plants are essential as food and for all people and also as recreation for people who enjoy gardening, horticulture, and culinary arts. History Early botany The history of botany begins with ancient writings on, and classifications of, plants...