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Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
The earliest roots of science can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3500 to 3000 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and assimilation of Greek works and Islamic inquiries into Western Europe from the 10th to 13th century revived "natural philosophy", which was later transformed by the Scientific Revolution that began in the 16th century as new ideas and discoveries departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions. The scientific method soon played a greater role in knowledge creation and it was not until the 19th century that many of the institutional and professional features of science began to take shape; along with the changing of "natural philosophy" to "natural science."
Modern science is typically divided into three major branches that consist of the natural sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics), which study nature in the broadest sense; the social sciences (e.g., economics, psychology, and sociology), which study individuals and societies; and the formal sciences (e.g., logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science), which study abstract concepts. There is disagreement, however, on whether the formal sciences actually constitute a science as they do not rely on empirical evidence. Disciplines that use existing scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine, are described as applied sciences.
Science is based on research, which is commonly conducted in academic and research institutions as well as in government agencies and companies. The practical impact of scientific research has led to the emergence of science policies that seek to influence the scientific enterprise by prioritizing the development of commercial products, armaments, health care, and environmental protection.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Electrodynamics: from Ampere to Einstein
- Einstein Manifolds
- A Short History of Chemistry
- A Scientist at the Seashore
- The Birth and Death of the Sun
- The large scale structure of space-time
- Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- Modeling Black Hole Evaporation
- Pliny : Natural history ; with an English translation in ten volumes
- Unreliable: The Science and Logic of Bill Nye
- Particle physics
- The Grand Design
- The Roots of Humankind
- Ideas and Opinions
- Intelligent Life in the Universe
- The Collapsing Universe: The Story of the Black Holes
- How Physics Confronts Reality: Einstein Was Correct, But Bohr Won the Game
- Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
- From Quarks to Black Holes: Interviewing the Universe
- Asimov On Numbers
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
- Planets for Man
- The Mysterious Universe
- The Book of Eggs: A Life-Size Guide to the Eggs of Six Hundred of the World's Bird Species
- Einstein, Physics and Reality
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
- Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics
- Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language
- Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe
- 100 Years Of Relativity: Space-time Structure - Einstein And Beyond
- Einstein for Beginners
- Black Holes And Baby Universes And Other Essays
- The Hidden Reality
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- The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
- The Ray Kurzweil Reader : A collection of essays
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- The Possibilities Mind: Conversations With God, Einstein, and Others
- The Accidental Universe
- The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
- Outliers: The Story of Success
- Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
- My Brief History
- The Once and Future Cosmos: Scientific American Special Edition
- Einstein and the Ether
- Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
- Energy, the Subtle Concept
- The Varieties of Scientific Experience
- Cosmology
- The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
- Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, And The Great Debate About The Nature Of Reality
- Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- The Universe of General Relativity
- Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics
- The First Three Minutes: A modem view of the origin of the universe
- 'No Success like Failure ...': Einstein's Quest for General Relativity, 1907-1920
- What Einstein Told His Barber: More Scientific Answers to Everyday Questions
- Pursuit of Genius: Flexner, Einstein, and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study
- The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
- The God Delusion
- Introduction to General Relativity, Black Holes, and Cosmology
- Einstein and Poincaré: The Physical Vacuum
- Lectures on Quantum Mechanics
- Proof: The Science of Booze
- What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures
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- 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
- Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
- The Elegant Universe
- Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory
- A Brief History of Time
- What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
- Lectures on Quantum Gravity and Black Holes
- Black Holes, Wormholes and Time Machines
- Secrets of the Old One: Einstein, 1905
- Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
- Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius
- The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
- Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain
- Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology
- Chaos: Making a New Science
- Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
- Cosmos
- Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning
- Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
- Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
- Bad Science
- The Brain That Changes Itself
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
- Dragons of Eden
- Beyond Star Trek: Physics From Alien Invasions To The End Of Time
- The Selfish Gene
- The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
- Contact
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
- On the Origin of Species
- The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
- Nothing
- Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
- The Nuclear Winter: The World After Nuclear War
- The Universe in a Nutshell
- The Quantum Theory of Fields
- A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science
- Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body
- Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders: Science and Practice
- Encyclopedia of Mathematics
- One Two Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science
- The Science of Interstellar
- Behavioral Science
- Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children
- The Ultimate Quotable Einstein
- Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science
- Brief Answers to the Big Questions
- Einstein's Apple: Homogeneous Einstein Fields
- God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway?
- The Illustrated On The Shoulders of Giants
- Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science