ABSTRACT
Scientic knowledge shifts from one frontier to the next with seminal discoveries. The seeds of these discoveries are sown in basic investigations driven by human curiosity. Nearly all scientic and technological accomplishments of today can be traced to explorations and inventions of the past. The wheels used in automobiles, buses, trains, and airplanes were invented to move carts and chariots with onagers in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia. The buoyancy principle of Archimedes is what ¡oats boats, ships, and other vessels in water. Ubiquitous wireless technologies around us owe much to Hans Christian Orsted, Andre-Marie Ampere, James Maxwell, and Heinrich Hertz for their discovery of electromagnetism, electrodynamics, and electromagnetic and radio waves.* Satellites orbit the earth and spaceships travel to other planets according to the gravitational laws discovered by Isaac Newton. In the English version of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he eloquently expressed this proliferation of scientic knowledge and wrote:†
Then from these forces by other propositions, which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the Planets, the Comets, the Moon, and the Sea. I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles. For I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend on certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other and cohere in regular gures, or repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, researchers have hitherto attempted to search in vain. But I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to that, or to some truer method of Philosophy.
