were dominant. Anti-German sentiment caused by World War I and World War II and boycotts of German scientists resulted in the loss of German as a scientific language. In later decades of the 20th century, the economic dominance and scientific productivity of the United States led to the rise of English, which after the end of the Cold War has become the dominant language of scientific communication. Political support One of the basic requirements for a scientific community is the existence and approval of a political sponsor; in England, the Royal Society operates under the aegis of the monarchy; in the US, the National Academy of Sciences was founded by Act 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 BC322 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