Heroic Model Of Science Essay, Research Paper
The heroic model of science is one of the most influential phenomena in history. This surge of value-free knowledge, filled with realism, bold justification, absolute truth and complete objectivity, changed the way in which the world was perceived and how the future would be viewed. The heroic model changed the rules and ushered western civilization into a new era, filled with wonderfully shocking scientific surprises. The backlash from the heroic model was so powerful that it heavily influenced other subjects, such as history.
The heroic model of science was a phenomenon of the western world, during the Enlightenment. This wonder aided in transforming scientists, philosophers and others among them into cultural heroes. Science became a part of home life, when in previous times science was seen as a threat to religion and thus proclaimed as wrong. Once science became a part of life and began to prove and bluntly say things that the bible and religion could not come near to explaining, it became the basis for fact. The heroic model could easily be blamed for the breakdown of the religious-infested societies that plagued the world.
This became very important to everyone involved, which proved to be more people than expected. The heroic model was an opening for scientist and others to express their opinions without the fear of being ostracized and labeled as a blasphemer. These people were no longer look down upon as sinners, against God and religion, yet they were praised for bring truth and secularity to the world. Facts no longer were infested or influenced by religion, the truth was the real truth. It replaced the fear and anxiety that nature once evoked with hope inspired by an ordered, harmonious, knowable world.
The heroic model boosted science to a level that nothing else had ever reached or attempted to attain. Science, during the Enlightenment and consequently afterwards, was used to measure the status of a country and their position of power. If a country was not as advance as another country was in the sciences then that country was obviously not civilized and was beneath the other country. Such as, the economy might be used to determine the status or worldly position of a country today that is how science was used during the Age of Enlightenment.
The progression of science and the overwhelming success of the heroic model not only yanked science to the forefront, but it also influenced and changed the way history was being perceived and studied. Historians began to realize that the concepts and basics of new science could be used in history. The systematic, step-by-step process used in science could now be applied, successfully, in the writing and development of history. History was no longer just an account of the past, yet it became a profession filled with university-educated men, who used an analytical way of analyzing the past.
The heroic model of science ushered in a new form of history, a scientific history, which sought the truth in the same systematic way as science. This gave the study of history an intellectual absolutism of its own, but it began, as did the heroic model of science itself, as a challenge to the earlier absolutisms of the throne and altar and to histories that were meant to show the hand of God at work among saints and rulers. When the process of creating modern history was completed, Biblical time lay in ruins and the dreams of millenarians came to be seen as grand self delusions.
The Enlightenment and the rise of science, in the world, affected many different studies, but out of all the other studies history seems to be the one that was influenced the greatest. The heroic model ushered in a new way of studying, writing, analyzing and perceiving, not only history, but also time. Historians, with the advent of scientific history could now measure development by progress toward modern. With a newer, stronger foundation historians laid their claim on the past and no one can take that away from them, ever.