The Scientific Revolution established science as a source for the growth of knowledge. During the 19th century, the practice of science became professionalized and institutionalized in ways that continued through the 20th century. As the role of scientific knowledge grew in society, it became incorporated with many aspects of the functioning of nation-states.

The history of science is marked by a chain of advances in technology and knowledge that have always complemented each other. Technological innovations bring about new discoveries and are bred by other discoveries, which inspire new possibilities and approaches to longstanding science issues.

Science existed before the modern era, but modern science is so distinct in its approach and successfull in its results that it now defines what science is in the strictest sense of the term. While descriptions of disciplined empirical investigations of the natural world exist from times at least as early as classical antiquity (for example, by Aristotle and Pliny the Elder), andscientific methods have been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Alhazen and Roger Bacon), the dawn of modern science is generally traced back to the early modern period during what is known as the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. This period was marked by a new way of studying the natural world, by methodical experimentation aimed at defining “laws of nature” while avoiding concerns with metaphysical concerns such as Aristotle’stheory of causation.

Science (from Latin: scientia meaning “knowledge”) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.An older and closely related meaning still in use today is that found for example in Aristotle, whereby “science” refers to the body of reliable knowledge itself, of the type that can be logically and rationally explained (see ”History and etymology” section below).

Since classical antiquity science as a type of knowledge was closely linked to philosophy. In the early modern era the two words, “science” and “philosophy”, were sometimes used interchangeably in the English language. By the 17th century, “natural philosophy” (which is today called “natural science”) had begun to be considered separately from “philosophy” in general.However, “science” continued to be used in a broad sense denoting reliable knowledge about a topic, in the same way it is still used in modern terms such as library science or political science.