Curious People Who Sat Around Thinking About Everything...

Some curious Babylonians started staring at the sky
Looking at the sun, moon & planets, wondering why
Wrote some observations on clay tablets and discovered 
The lunar month and solar year
Astronomy got going with what they saw with the naked eye

Egyptians liked to build things and employed geometry
Had to get those corners square using primitive technology
They decorated the walls with a record of their lives
Showed us they practiced medicine and surveyed the fields
A lot of what they knew was written down by Ptolemy

The Greeks tried to explain the order of the Cosmos
Knew the earth was round thanks to Pythagoras of Samos
Plato and Aristotle liked to get down to debate
Noting explanations could be found through observations
Archimedes calculated Pi and invented a few gizmos

Aryabatha of India loved his trigonomic functions
Madhava used math to eliminate assumptions
The ancients of India learned the secrets of metal
They even practiced dentistry and dabbled in plastic surgery
All the while putting numbers to planetary junctions

The modern scientific method was a gift of Ibn Al Haytham
Who is regarded by many as the Ptolemy of Islam
Diseases were contagious declared Ibn Sina
Jabir ibn Hayyan took alchemy and gave us chemistry
Decimal points also gifts from the people known as Muslim

The Chinese elevated mathematics to an art
Su Song used cylindrical projection to make a star chart
The earth shook and Zhang Heng could tell the King where
His seismometer predated Richter by a few thousand years
Paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder...they were smart! 

All of their works became known and appreciated in Europe
The greatest minds of which had started to develop
Theories of their own regarding the nature of the Universe
Printed and shared in the language of the common man
Intellectual inquiry and reason hit ignorance with a wallop

The earth no longer thought of as the center of it all
Empirical facts and experiments hit at the superstitious wall
That had kept men in the dark for much too long
The illumination was so great it named the age
And Newton, Kepler, Descartes all heeded the call

Still there are those who reject science's rapid climb
Who look at the work of scientists as unpardonable crime
These people prefer the comfort of classic fairy tales
They would much rather believe in medieval myths
Than accept the reality of this modern time