Great Scientific Ideas that Changed the World

The objective of this course is to explore scientific ideas that have played a formative role in determining the infrastructure of modern life through a process of sociocultural selection. But we shall interpret the term scientific idea broadly. There is, after all, no sharp distinction between ideas that are classified as scientific and those that are classified as philosophical or mathematical or even between scientific ideas and political, religious, or aesthetic ideas. Alfred North Whitehead, for example, famously linked the emergence of modern science in the Christian West to Judaeo-Christian monotheism: to the belief in a single, law-observing creator of the Universe.