MATHEMATICAL IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN SCIENCE

• DOI: 10.22533/at.ed.3173362325105

• Palavras-chave: mathematics; knowledge; history; science.

• Keywords: mathematics; knowledge; history; science.

• Abstract:

  The present study aimed to: demonstrate that with the history of science it is clear that mathematics guided the type of knowledge that was developed in the 17th century and that created the scientific method that predominates to this day. Explain the scientific method by relating it to philosophers: mathematical knowledge at the foundation of the paradigm of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Readings, analysis and interpretation of the authors were carried out and the following items were addressed: science, philosophers, scientific revolution. This research was carried out from February to June 2016. Modern science is characterized by a mental or intellectual attitude through two traits that complement each other: 1) the destruction of the cosmos and consequently the disappearance in science. 2) The geometrization of space, that is, the replacement by the homogeneous and abstract space of Euclidean geometry of the conception of a space in pre-Galilean physics. It can be expressed in: the mathematization (geometrization) of nature and, consequently, the mathematization of science. This implies the disappearance of the scientific perspective, of all considerations based on value, perfection, harmony, meaning and design. Such considerations disappear in the infinite space of the new Universe and, it is in this new world, where geometry becomes reality, that the laws of classical physics find value and application. This way of thinking, which characterizes the period in which scientific knowledge has been growing, does not take into consideration, the study of the whole, but analyzes its parts. Knowledge of the properties of the parts, however, does not lead to knowledge of the whole. Therefore, the science that reduces the complex environment to its parts is a source of violence, as it allows experts to act on the environment in just some of its parts, forgetting the connections between them. The transition from Aristotelian Physics to the classical Physics of Galileo and Newton occurs through the transformation of qualities into quantities, concluding that science would be more rigorous the more mathematizable it was. Modern science will compare nature and man himself to a machine, a set of mechanisms whose (mathematical) laws need to be discovered.