Scientific communication

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 403.

FREE-READING PASSAGE

It is advisable that you read the following passage for some more about science. You can pick up some new vocabulary items. Try to do some practice on translation.

Throughout history, scientific knowledge has been transmitted chiefly through written documents, some of which are more than 4000 years old. From ancient Greece, however, no substantial scientific work survives from the period before the geometrician Euclid's Elements (circa 300 BC). Of the treatises written by leading scientists after that time, o nly about half are extant. Some of these are in Greek, and others were preserved through translation by Arab scholars in the Middle Ages. Medieval schools and universities were largely responsible for preserving these works and for fostering scientific activity. Since the Renaissance, however, this work has been shared by scientific societies; the oldest such society, which still survives, is the Academia del Lincei (to which Galileo belonged), established in 1603 to promote the study of mathematical, physical, and natural sciences. Later in the century, governmental support of science led to the founding of the Royal Society of London (1662) and the Academia des Sciences de Paris (1666). These two organizations initiated publication of scientific journals, the former under the title Philosophical Transactions and the latter as Mộmoires.

During the 18th century academies of science were established by other leading nations.

In the U.S. in 1743, Benjamin Franklin organized the American Philosophical Society for“promoting useful knowledge.” In 1780 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was organized by John Adams, who became the second U.S. president in 1797. In 1831 the British Association for the Advancement of Science met for the first time, followed in 1848 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1872 by the Association Française pour l'Avancement des Sciences. These national organizations issue the journals Nature, Science, and Compte-Rendus, respectively. The number of scientific journals grew so rapidly during the early 20th century that A World List of Scientific Periodicals Published in the Years 1900-1933 contained some 36,000 entries in 18 languages. A large number of these are issued by specialized societies devoted to individual sciences, and most of them are fewer than 100 years old.

Since late in the 19th century, communication among scientists has been facilitated by the establishment of international organizations, such as the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (1873) and the International Council of Research (1919). The latter is a scientific federation subdivided into international unions for each of the various sciences. The unions hold international congresses every few years, the transactions of which are usually published. In addition to national and international scientific organizations, numerous major industrial firms have research departments; some of them regularly publish accounts of the work done or else file reports with government patent offices, which in turn print abstracts in bulletins that are published periodically.

(From http://encarta.com)