of the United States Congress;
etc.
Otherwise, when the basic elements of knowledge
were being formulated, the political rulers
of the respective communities could choose
to arbitrarily either support or disallow
the nascent scientific communities.
For example, Alhazen had to feign madness
to avoid execution.
The polymath Shen Kuo lost political support,
and could not continue his studies until he
came up with discoveries that showed his worth
to the political rulers.
The admiral Zheng He could not continue his
voyages of exploration after the emperors
withdrew their support.
Another famous example was the suppression
of the work of Galileo, by the twentieth century,
Galileo would be pardoned.
== Patterns in the history of science ==
One of the major occupations with those interested
in the history of science is whether or not
it displays certain patterns or trends, usually
along the question of change between one or
more scientific theories.
Generally speaking,there have historically
been three major models adopted in various
forms within the philosophy of science.
The first major model, implicit in most early
histories of science and generally a model
put forward by practicing scientists themselves
in their textbook literature, is associated
with the criticisms of logical positivism
by Karl Popper (1902–1994) from the 1930s.
Popper's model of science is one in which
scientific progress is achieved through a
falsification of incorrect theories and the
adoption instead of theories which are progressively
closer to truth.
In this model, scientific progress is a linear
accumulation of facts, each one adding to
the last.
In this model, the physics of Aristotle (384
BC – 322 BC) was simply subsumed by the
work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (classical
mechanics), which itself was eclipsed by the
work of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) (Relativity),
and later the theory of quantum mechanics
(established in 1925), each one