Brain power still the genesis of scientific breakthroughs

Will we ever again see a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein - scientists who decoded the laws of nature using nothing more than brainpower and a few simple tools? Or can the human mind no longer make fundamental breakthroughs in science without the aid of supercomputers, space missions and enormous expenditure?

Through much of human history, from the Babylonians 4,000 years ago to Einstein in the early 20th century, scientific discoveries have been made with patient observation, manual calculation, rudimentary instruments, critical thinking and intelligent analysis. The human mind was the most powerful instrument.

By just thinking about it long and hard, the Greeks conceived the philosophy of science between 350BC and AD400. Aristotle and his students established logic and reasoning as requisites of the scientific method and rational thought. These principles, along with Euclid's treatise on geometry and mathematical proof around 300BC, and Diophantus' on arithmetic and algebra around AD200, laid the foundations for scientific investigation.

The power of the human mind is even more stunning in astronomy. Astronomers in antiquity could only observe with the naked eye the glimmer of lights hundreds of thousands of kilometres away in the night sky. Yet by the second millennium BC, Babylonians in Mesopotamia had identified the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn by meticulously tracking their periodic movement across the sky. During the same period, Chinese stargazers correctly determined that Jupiter takes 12 years to complete one rotation around the sun. It would be another 3,700 years before William Herschel, a British astronomer, discovered the next planet in the solar system, Uranus, in 1781 using a telescope.

The invention of the telescope, though it was primitive by today's standards, enabled astronomers in the 16th and 17th centuries - Copernicus, Brahe, Keppler, Galileo - to map earth's movement around the sun, as well as other planetary orbits.

It took the genius of Isaac Newton (1643-1727) to combine the discoveries of earlier scientists with his own insights to reveal the workings of the solar system. With pen-and-paper calculations, he explained how objects move when a force acts on them, how gravity was the force of attraction between two objects and how the force of gravity is affected by distance and mass. Newton's laws of motion laid the foundation of modern physics.