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Hooke also selected several objects of human origin; among these objects were the jagged edge of a honed razor and the point of a needle, seeming blunt under the microscope. His goal may well have been to contrast the flawed products of mankind with the perfection of nature (and hence, in the spirit of the times, of biblical creation).
Robert Hooke FRS (/ h ʊ k /; 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) [4] [a] was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. [5]
1802 – The term biology in its modern sense was propounded independently by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur) and Lamarck (Hydrogéologie). The word was coined in 1800 by Karl Friedrich Burdach. 1809 – Lamarck proposed a modern theory of evolution based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
This theory held that "lower" animals such as insects were generated by decaying organic substances, and that life arose by chance. [20] [21] This was questioned from the 17th century, in works like Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. [22] [23] In 1665, Robert Hooke published the first drawings of a microorganism.
Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum first described the concept of a situation in which one theory but not others would hold true, using the name instantia crucis; the phrase experimentum crucis, denoting the deliberate creation of such a situation for the purpose of testing the rival theories, was later coined by Robert Hooke and then famously used by Isaac Newton.
The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to Ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
The brilliant iridescent colors of the peacock's tail feathers are created by structural coloration, as first noted by Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke.. Structural coloration in animals, and a few plants, is the production of colour by microscopically structured surfaces fine enough to interfere with visible light instead of pigments, although some structural coloration occurs in combination ...
Julius Robert von Mayer and James Prescott Joule measure the heat generated by mechanical work. This establishes the principle of conservation of energy and the kinetic theory of heat (1842–1843). Louis Pasteur separates a racemic mixture of two enantiomers by sorting individual crystals, and demonstrates their impact on the polarization of ...