Discovery (observation)

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1 Historical discoveries
- 1.1 Age of Exploration
- 1.2 Modern discoveries
2 See also
3 External links

[edit] Historical discoveries

The discovery that the Earth was not flat. In Western culture, Greek philosophers realized that the Earth was round by the fourth century BCE; non-western cultures noticed it even earlier. Indeed, the curvature of the earth is fairly obvious to seagoing people--for example, watching a ship disappear bottom-first over the horizon.

[edit] Age of Exploration

Western culture has used the term "discovery" in their histories to subtly emphasize their own importance in the history of the world. Since the beginning of contact between Europe and the rest of the world, the "discovery" of every continent, island, and geographical feature, disregarded the fact that, in nearly every case, native people had already "discovered" it centuries or even millennia before. In that way, the term has Eurocentric and ethnocentric meaning often overlooked by westerners.

[edit] Modern discoveries

Experiments by JJ Thomson in 1897 led to the discovery of a fundamental building block of matter - electron. The discovery of the structure of DNA. The discovery of quasars.