History of Scientific Method Timeline

During the European Renaissance of the 12th century, ideas on scientific methodology, including Aristotle's empiricism and the experimental approaches of Alhazen and Avicenna, were introduced to medieval Europe via Latin translations of Arabic and Greek texts.

Image source: Renaissance of the 12th century

By the late 15th century, the physician-scholar Niccolò Leoniceno was finding errors in Pliny's Natural History, undermining blind reliance on ancient authority.

Image source: Niccolò Leoniceno

The discovery of the Americas at the close of the 15th century showed European scholars that new discoveries could be found outside the authoritative works of Aristotle, Pliny, Galen, and other ancient writers.

Image source: History of the Americas

Thomas Linacre, the teacher of Erasmus, translated Methodus Medendi from Greek into Latin for a larger audience in 1519, spreading Galenic medical methodology in Europe.

Image source: Thomas Linacre

To counter errors in ancient botanical texts, a botanical garden was established at Orto botanico di Padova, University of Padua (in use for teaching by 1546), so medical students might have empirical access to pharmacopia plants.

Image source: Orto botanico di Padova

The first printed work devoted to the concept of method is Jodocus Willichius's De methodo omnium artium et disciplinarum informanda opusculum (1550).

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Limbrick notes that 630 editions, translations, and commentaries on Galen were produced in Europe in the 16th century, eventually eclipsing Arabic medicine there and peaking in 1560, at the time of the Scientific Revolution.

Image source: Galen

In 1562 Outlines of Pyrrhonism by the ancient Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus was made available in Latin, reviving skeptical challenges to claims of certain knowledge.

Image source: Sextus Empiricus

Francisco Sanches, led by his medical training to search for a true method of knowing, published That Nothing is Known (Quod Nihil Scitur, 1581), critiquing Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning and warning against relying on commentaries on Aristotle.

Image source: Francisco Sanches

In 1572, Tycho noticed a completely new star that was brighter than any star or planet, demonstrating that the heavens could change and challenging Aristotelian cosmology.

Image source: Tycho Brahe

Francis Bacon entered Trinity College, Cambridge in April 1573, where he concluded that the methods employed and results attained in current learning were alike erroneous, learning to despise the current Aristotelian philosophy.

Image source: Francis Bacon

Over fifteen years (1576–1591), Tycho and upwards of thirty assistants charted the positions of stars, planets, and other celestial bodies at Uraniborg with unprecedented accuracy.

Image source: Uraniborg

In 1600, Tycho hired Johannes Kepler to assist him in analyzing and publishing his observations, data that would later underpin Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Image source: Johannes Kepler

In 1619, René Descartes began writing his first major treatise on proper scientific and philosophical thinking, the unfinished Rules for the Direction of the Mind, continued in his Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641).

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Francis Bacon explained how his inductive method is applied in his Novum Organum (published 1620), an echo of whose program would influence later statistical reasoning about error.

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Descartes clarified his rationalist approach in his 1637 treatise Discourse on Method, taking up the challenge posed by Francisco Sanches and championing reason as the path to certain knowledge.

Image source: Discourse on the Method

Newton's work became a model that other sciences sought to emulate, and his inductive approach formed the basis for much of natural philosophy through the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Image source: Isaac Newton

Attempts to systematize a scientific method were confronted in the mid-18th century by the problem of induction, which asserts that nothing can be known with certainty except what is actually observed; Hume's arguments influenced educated thought well into the 19th century.

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Many of Hume's radically skeptical arguments were argued against, but not resolutely refuted, by Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the late 18th century.

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Hans Christian Ørsted, heavily influenced by Kant, exemplified in his 'First Introduction to General Physics' (1811) the steps of observation, hypothesis, deduction and experiment.

Image source: Hans Christian Ørsted

In 1831 John Herschel published A Preliminary Discourse on the study of Natural Philosophy, setting out the principles of science.

Image source: John Herschel

William Whewell regarded his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) as an introduction to the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), which analyzes the method exemplified in the formation of ideas.

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John Stuart Mill was stimulated to publish A System of Logic (1843) upon reading Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, codifying canons of inductive inference.

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In An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), Claude Bernard described what makes a scientific theory good and what makes a scientist a true discoverer, bringing the scientific method to medicine.

Image source: Claude Bernard

In the late 19th century, Charles Sanders Peirce proposed an influential schema: in 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878) he outlined an objectively verifiable method testing truth via deduction and induction, and formulated modern statistics in 'Illustrations of the Logic of Science' (1877–1878) and 'A Theory of Probable Inference' (1883).

Image source: Charles Sanders Peirce

In 1934 Karl Popper published The Logic of Scientific Discovery, repudiating the traditional observationalist-inductivist account of the scientific method and advancing falsifiability.

Image source: The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Ludwik Fleck, a Polish epidemiologist contemporary with Popper, published Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (German 1935, English 1979), influencing Kuhn and others.

In 1962 Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggesting scientists worked within paradigms and arguing there was little evidence of scientists following a falsificationist methodology.

Image source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions