To understand the role of science in the development of society, it is important to point out one more division of sciences: theoretical and applied sciences, technical. Theoretical, or fundamental, sciences study the most general laws of development of nature and society, explain the deepest causal links between various phenomena. Theoretical sciences are not used directly for practical use. However, the truths, theories and laws imprinted in theoretical knowledge are of great social and cultural significance. They have a significant impact on the worldview of society, on people's perception of the world around them. The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo turned people's ideas about the world upside down: it turned out that the Earth is not the center of the universe, but one of the planets revolving around the Sun. The achievements of science in the 20th century have changed our ideas about time and space, about the natural resources of the Earth, about mortality not only of an individual person, but of humanity as a whole. Therefore, science is one of the forms of social consciousness, that is, the perception of the world by society.
Theoretical sciences serve as the basis, the foundation for technical, applied sciences. Thus, the laws of the development of a living cell discovered by biology have become the basis for medicine's search for the causes of diseases arising at the cellular level, and the development of drugs against them. Mathematics and physics are working tools for sciences such as engineering science or strength of materials.
Applied, technical science is directly used in the practical activities of people. And it was precisely here that science most clearly manifested its social significance: it became a direct productive force. More details can be found on the "development" site.
If you turn to the past, you will find that for many centuries science and technology existed as parallel lines, without intersecting. The ships sailed the seas before Archimedes with the exclamation of "Eureka!" jumped out of the bathtub and inscribed his famous law, which explained why they swim. The steam engine, the internal combustion engine, were created by inventors who had no theoretical knowledge. Only later did scientists theoretically comprehend what the inventors came to on the basis of intuition, ingenuity and skill. Conversely, not a single major discovery of theoretical physics in the 19th century had any impact on technical thought, not even thermodynamics or Maxwell's equation.
Only in the first half of the 20th century, science directly invades technology and economics - the era of industrial use of electricity, electromagnetic waves, chemistry, and the pharmaceutical industry began. In the studies of the microworld and the atom, discoveries were made, equal in importance to Newtonian mechanics: the theory of relativity and the photoelectric effect of A. Einstein, quantum mechanics (M. Planck, Louis de Broglie, M. Born, W. Heisenberg). Fundamental discoveries had a direct impact on the creation of industrial technology for obtaining atomic (nuclear) energy.
Genetic engineering has revolutionized medicine, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture. Probably the biggest scientific revolution has been the advances in information technology, computer science and computer technology. The first computer started working in England on June 21, 1948 - it weighed one ton, and the computing unit consisted of 600 lamps. Today, computers run on tiny integrated circuits, which has made it possible for computerization to penetrate all walks of life. Humanity has entered a new era - the era of informatization.
The development of science is a continuous process. It cannot be stopped by any prohibitions. In the same way, it is impossible to reliably determine what discovery will be made tomorrow, or say when such and such a discovery will be made, which is eagerly awaited by all of humanity.
