Classical Studies 2700B
Theories in Ancient Science
Please read Chapter 8, on this general topic, in Landels.
[We shall begin with two short excerpts from a video about the reconstructed trireme, which was described in Thursday’s class; then we shall conclude the lecture on Sea Transportation by talking about non-naval shipping in the ancient Mediterranean; thereafter we shall turn to the following:]
The main topic of this lecture will be an account of the strange relationship between Greek philosophy and Greek scientific enquiry: in the 6th century BC certain learned Greeks began to speculate about the nature of “the world”. In each case, the major thinkers had a “big idea” about what the world was like and where it was in relation to things observed in the heavens. This kind of “grand theory of everything” speculation is actually quite the reverse of what is, today, considered “proper” scientific practice; modern science observes, collects information, and then gradually builds up some kind of hypothesis from “below”; Greek philosophy began from “above” with THE GRAND THEORY OF EVERYTHING and then worked down to the minor stuff and basically straitjacketed it to fit into the grand theory. The greatest Greek theoretical success was in Geometry; but this was basically a process of description and definition, and successful as it was (when you had mastered every one of Euclid’s theorems on the triangle, for instance, you knew EVERYTHING there was to know about the triangle), this basic process of definition misled the Greeks into thinking that it was sufficient for a complete understanding of the world. Also, many of the ideas from early Greek philosophy were barely rational, anyway. (Some examples.) Laboratory experiment, on the other hand, which the Greeks seem to have regarded as “unnatural”, was practically unknown; the example in Landels, of Hero speaking about siphons, is a rare occurrence.
The greatest failure of Greek investigators (and, by implication, of Romans also) lay in their inability to measure small units of time accurately; the Roman calendar provides a grim illustration of this problem: to tell the time, for example, you had to know what the date was, since the length of the hour varied with the season of the year. Because of this failure, neither the Greeks nor the Romans did calculations involving length, or height or distance multiplied by time; so no “miles per hour” or “feet per second per second”; and no “physical quantities” either, which are absolutely fundamental to modern science.
However, some people were capable of great imaginative
leaps; we have already seen how Eratosthenes of Cyrene was able, in the 3rd
century BC, to calculate both the circumference of the earth and the distance
of the earth from the sun. Similarly, in the 3rd century BC,
Archimedes was prepared to calculate the number of grains of sand in the
universe (and also to solve mathematical problems not subsequently solvable
until