Greek Science
By: Jinny Chung
Tags: Ancient History, Science, Greece, Astronomy

Science as we understand it starts with the ancient Greeks, this extraordinary culture that lived in the Aegean part of the Mediterranean about 2,500 years ago. Over a span of a few hundred years, a small number of extraordinary thinkers, philosophers of the time, came up with strikingly prescient ideas about nature and the universe. They didn’t always agree, and they weren’t observational scientists, but they were philosophers. Thanks to this unique role, we can see a striking divergence in the ideas they had. Consider this on the possibility of life and the universe. Epicurus said, there must be infinite worlds both like and unlike this world. And going on, we should speculate about creatures and perhaps intelligent creatures in those worlds. That’s a strikingly modern statement that fits completely with modern astrobiology. And yet from the same time, we also have the statement of Aristotle that this world must be unique, the earth, there can be no other world.

More than 25 centuries ago, among the Greek islands, here with the vibrant crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe, philosophers began to devise rational theories about the world around them. The wondrous waves and foams of nature, they said, could be understood. One Greek thinker suggested that the earth actually moved around the sun. Another thought that everything, the work of men and nature was made of pattern, too small to see. Others estimated the sizes of the Earth and moon, and the distances between them, and reasoned that both were spheres. But it would be many centuries before we had the tools to extend our vision and confirm the wisdom of these early thinkers. In the meantime, people around the world gazed at the stars and gave them names; most assumed that the earth was the center of an unchanging universe.

The greeks were a small, nimble society and they were democratic in their implementation of the rule of law. The key to what the Greeks did in science and why they did something that other cultures before them didn’t, was that they made mental models of nature. Other cultures were willing to track the night sky and indeed see patterns, but they never went to a general principle or an abstract idea of what they saw, they just took it to be the way they saw it. The Greeks were making mental models and they were using mathematics to understand the patterns of nature in an abstract way and rather than a literal way. This is the rudiment of the scientific method.

Mathematics — Pythagoras

Pythagoras

The Egyptians used to survey the Egyptian Nile Valley that flooded every year because, during the floods, all the lines and demarcations with property were obliterated. And so they developed the surveying techniques to resurvey the plots of land in the Nile Delta.

To lay out these right-angle triangles, they kept enormous loops of rope knotted in increments that corresponded to perfect triangles. For instance, 3 squared plus 4 squared equals 5 squared. They would keep the triad of numbers that led to perfect triangles. Meaning they would stretch these lobes into right-angle triangles of different sides and put a rectilinear grid in place every year. This leads us to Pythagoras who invented the Pythagorean theorem. A squared plus b squared equals c squared. What he is doing is abstracting into algebra a general case. This is a great example of how mathematics that was applied to the natural world can become the basis of the scientific method, dating back to these ancient times.