The most significant discovery of the New World is not the Viking’s discovery but that of the Spanish.

In 1484 the Portuguese were already working on a way to Asia by going around the coast of Africa, and rejected Christopher’s theories that the Indies could be reached by sailing west around the world.

Columbus moved to Spain, and initially met similar rejections from a Spanish royal commission. In April 1492 his persistence finally paid off as Ferdinand V, king of Castile, and Queen Isabella agreed to sponsor his expedition with promises of riches and nobility for the navigator if his theories were right.

The fact that Christopher Columbus (who was not originally Spanish) appealed to a foreign court to offer his services proved that the discovery of America was not incidental.

The Canary Islands were an excellent bridgehead for alternate routes. This is what Christopher Columbus offered and he offered it to a State that needed them, but which was also accustomed to and prepared for this type of venture. Unified Spain possessed in 1492 a powerful war machine, a solid economy, an exterior projection, naval experience including the exploration of trade routes and notable scientific-technical potential mathematicians, geographers, astronomers and shipbuilders who had been formed in a melting-pot of three cultures (Jews, Muslims and Christians). Its only rival was its neighbor, Portugal, which had put a stop to Spanish expansion in Africa.

In 1492 the joint rulers of Castile and Aragon conquered the Moorish kingdom of Granada, that had been providing Castile with African goods through its tribute, and they decided to fund Christopher Columbus’ expedition that they hoped would bypass Portugal’s lock on Africa and the Indian Ocean reaching Asia by travelling west.

Christopher Columbus made a total of four voyages from Spain to what he called the New World, between 1492 and 1504.

On the 12th of October of the same year 1492, Columbus did not reach Asia, but rather found a New World, America. It was the first voyage which was set sail from Palos, Spain, on August 3, 1492, with Christopher Columbus in the Santa María; accompanied by the Niña and the Pinta, and less than one hundred men.

The mast of the Pinta was damaged after three days and they were forced to drop anchor in the Canaries to repair it. The three vessels weighed anchor again on September 6 and sailed west.

After more than a month at sea, the crew could have been forgiven for thinking that their commander had lost his way and perhaps his marbles too. Columbus altered course to the south-west and the men soon saw signs that they were approaching land.

Early on the morning of October 12th land was indeed sighted, and a landing party arrived on an island in the Bahamas and named it San Salvador. The natives must have been surprised to hear that their island now belonged to Spain.

Over the next few weeks landings were also made on Cuba, named Juana by Columbus, and Española, now known as Hispaniola and shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus believed that they had arrived in the Indies.

In the end, the continent that celebrates Columbus Day is actually named after Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian navigator who explored the northern coast of America between 1499 and 1500, and told the world that they had discovered a new continent.

In 1911 the discovery that the world was billions of years old changed our view of the world for ever.
Imagine trying to understand history without any dates. You know, for example, that the First World War came before the Second World War, but how long before? Was it tens, hundreds or even thousands of years before? In certain situations, before radiometric dating, there was no way of knowing.

By the end of the 19th century, many geologists still believed the age of the Earth to be a few thousand years old, as indicated by the Bible, while others considered it to be around 100 million years old, in line with calculations made by Lord Kelvin, the most prestigious physicist of his day.

Dr Cherry Lewis, University of Bristol, UK, said: “The age of the Earth was hugely important for people like Darwin who needed enormous amounts of time in which evolution could occur. As Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s chief advocate said: ‘Biology takes its time from Geology’.”

In 1898 Marie Curie discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity and by 1904 Ernest Rutherford, a physicist working in Britain, realised that the process of radioactive decay could be harnessed to date rocks.

It was against this background of dramatic and exciting scientific discoveries that a young Arthur Holmes (1890-1964) completed his schooling and won a scholarship to study physics at the Royal College of Science in London. There he developed the technique of dating rocks using the uranium-lead method and from the age of his oldest rock discovered that the Earth was at least 1.6 billion years old (1,600 million).

But geologists were not as happy with the new results as, perhaps, they should have been. As Holmes, writing in Nature in 1913, put it: “the geologist who ten years ago was embarrassed by the shortness of time allowed to him for the evolution of the Earth’s crust, is still more embarrassed with the superabundance with which he is now confronted.” It continued to be hotly debated for decades.

Cherry Lewis commented, “In the 1920s, as the age of the Earth crept up towards 3 billion years, this took it beyond the age of the Universe, then calculated to be only 1.8 billion years old. It was not until the 1950s that the age of the Universe was finally revised and put safely beyond the age of the Earth, which had at last reached its true age of 4.56 billion years. Physicists suddenly gained a new respect for geologists!”

In the 1920s the new theory of continental drift became the great scientific conundrum, and most geologists were unable to accept the concept due to the lack of a mechanism for driving the continents around the globe.

In 1928 Arthur Holmes showed how convection currents in the substratum (now called the mantle) underlying the continents could be this mechanism. This proved to be correct but it was another 40 years before his theories were accepted and the theory of plate tectonics became a reality.

The theory of plate tectonics has proved to be as important as the theory of evolution and the discovery of the structure of the atom, but without the discovery of how to quantify geologic time, confirmation of plate tectonics would not have been possible.

Today, few discussions in geology can occur without reference to geologic time and plate tectonics. They are both integral to our way of thinking about the world. Holmes died in 1964 having lived just long enough to see sea floor spreading confirm his ideas of continental drift.

Source 

The earliest hominoids according to paleoanthropological studies began to use more of its thinking or mental other than its physical capabilities by the advent of the homo sapiens or thinking ape at the end of the Paleolithic period, some 2 million to 10,000 years ago or the Upper Paleolithic when man started to use tools in its daily activities.

At the advent of the Mesolithic Period, humans already have refined its tool making capability and enhanced its hunting capabilities resulting to the decline of animals near his domains requiring him to plan for his next hunting endeavor and this might have further sharpened his thoughts and his development of expressing his concept about quantity by recognizing how to count which is very important in his daily survival and this led him to the discovery of using numbers even before the discovery of writing.

During this period of illiteracy, the concept of quantity and counting was made evident by the use of numbers through the use of some physical representations through objects and some refined tools such as the quipo used by the Incas as tallies using knotted strings to record numbers.

The discovery of writing came as a breakthrough and this gave man the ultimate process to enhance his ability to manipulate or process any physical and abstract entities by the use of numbers and this started the early advancements in the history of mathematics.

By 1800 BC, the Babylonians already had solid knowledge of almost all aspects of elementary arithmetic which is the earliest branch of mathematics as shown in the clay tablet Plimpton 322 which seems to be a list of Pythagorean triples although historians can only guess at the methods used in generating the results because there were no workings to show how the list was originally produced. In the same way the Egyptian Rhind Mathematical Papyrus dated from 1650 BC which was evidently a copy of a much earlier text from 1850 BC shows evidence of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division utilized within a unit fraction system.

Within this period up to the 7th century AD, basic arithmetical operations were very complicated affairs because of the seemingly unsophisticated method of operation and numerical representation that were being used until the introduction of a new numerical and arithmetical system called the “Method of the Indians” which became the arithmetic that we used today.

Hindu-arabic arithmetic system as being called today because the Arabs popularized its use and led the way to its introduction to the Europeans by Fibonacci in 1202 is a much simpler method than all the other arithmetical system is then widely used because it uses zero and place-value notation.

From the early realization of the concept of quantity and counting and onwards, the use and manipulation of numbers to represent physical and abstract entities lead to one of the most important branches of knowledge of humanity that resulted to vast monumental achievements of societies from early civilizations until today as evident in the mysterious constructed monuments of olden times up to the present technological marvels of our time.