Being interested in the world, being curious to find out the causes of natural phenomena, is as old as man, but in the strict sense one cannot speak of science until the invention of writing, as the knowledge communicated through oral transmission was disorganized, imprecise, and fragmentary. For science to appear, the body of knowledge must constitute a coherent and ordered whole, which was practically impossible before more permanent means of storing information than human memory could be used.
As soon as writing systems appeared in the Middle East, India, China and America, sciences began to develop. The first three were medicine, mathematics, and astrology. They arose for practical reasons: to cure diseases; for the good management of the economy; to predict natural phenomena related to the cycle of the seasons. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and geology) were less necessary for early human societies, so they did not emerge until the Greek civilization.
For centuries, sciences were esoteric. Their
knowledge was the heritage of a few, who sought to increase their prestige by being
secret. Thus, the Pythagorean oath prohibited the members of this
school from divulging the existence of irrational numbers. Another
case was alchemy, ancient chemistry,
which was developed in Islamic civilization and during the Western Middle Ages:
its followers had to undergo many years of work and asceticism before being able
to decipher the texts of their subject with the help of a teacher.
During the first five thousand years of history,
scientific popularization barely existed. There were reasons: Books were scarce
and expensive. Most of the population was illiterate. It was not easy to make scientific
knowledge available to everyone. With the invention of the printing press,
the situation changed. At last it was possible to undertake the task of teaching
everyone to read and write. The process was slow, it took centuries, but by the
mid-19th century it was sufficiently advanced for the first serious attempts at
scientific popularization to appear.
In the United States, scientific popularization
reached maximum expansion and importance. In 1845, Rufus Porter, a New England inventor,
founded the Scientific American magazine,
initially dedicated to describing the latest inventions and technical discoveries,
although by 1850 it had diversified into other sciences and had a circulation of
30,000. Scientific American has long
been the most prestigious popular science magazine and has been translated into
other languages.
The popularization of astronomy
was important from the beginning, in the same way that five thousand years before
astrology was in the list of the first sciences. It’s easy to understand why: amateurs
of this science only need patience and a telescope. The number of stars is so great
and the field of study so vast, that a person without special training can inscribe
his name in the annals of astronomy as the discoverer of a comet or an asteroid.
Even today, when giant and space telescopes proliferate, the contribution of amateurs
is not negligible. Among the European popularizers of astronomy at the end of the
19th and the beginning of the 20th century, we can mention the Frenchman Camille
Flammarion and the Spaniard José Comas y Solá, founder of
the astronomical society of Spain and America. Both published many books and journalistic
articles.
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| Isaac Asimov |
Simultaneously, in the 19th and early 20th
centuries, a new literary genre proliferated, the science fiction novel. Its best
periodical publications, such as Galaxy
or The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
appreciated that the interest of their readers in science fiction was due to the
curiosity aroused by science. Starting in 1950, these magazines included popular
science articles authored by names who would soon achieve global prestige in this
field, such as Willy Ley, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac
Asimov.
As the 20th century progressed, interest in
popular science increased. Specialized magazines proliferated, and many mass media
dedicated a permanent section to these topics. Popular science programs reached
high audience levels on television. Among the most popular series we can mention
Cosmos, by the American astronomer
Carl Sagan, as well as the many films and series dedicated to the
underwater world made by the Frenchman Jacques-Yves Cousteau, inventor
of the aqualung and underwater television, and director for many years of the Oceanographic
Museum of Monaco. In Spain, Manuel Calvo Hernando, author
of many journalistic articles, and Luis Miravitlles on Spanish Television,
can be considered pioneers. Also noteworthy is the work of Félix Rodríguez
de la Fuente, who filmed highly successful television series about the lives
of animals.
It can be argued that the 1970s were the high
point of large-scale scientific dissemination. What has happened since? We will
talk about that in the next post.
Thematic Thread about Popular Science: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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