Introduction

Abstract

Modern science starts at the end of the Renaissance, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Newton. What distinguishes modern science from Greek philosophy is the central role of the experiment as the basic element of all notions, theories, and concepts; the interdependence between observed facts and theories, the discoveries starting from theories and their reflection and effects on the progress and rapid growth of scientific knowledge. The complexity of the factors on which scientific progress is based will become evident in the discussion of modern concepts of epistemology. Some of the grandiose speculations of Greek philosophy, such as the theory of continuity and the theory of the atom, still formed part of the thinking of physicists at the turn of the century. This thinking was revolutionized only by the spectacular advances of the physics of the twentieth century.