“Science” is an enormously broad topic that basically encompasses all disciplines that attempt to investigate and explain phenomena using empirical observation, while connecting and integrating prior knowledge. Fields ranging from nuclear physics to developmental biology to behavioral psychology to organic chemistry to even political science attempt fundamentally to employ the same strategies of observation, testing, verification, and analysis, in order to draw conclusions about the function of our world. Here in the 21st century we tend to take for granted this very concept of scientific endeavor. Radio sets, dinosaurs, volcanoes, Mars, and the DNA molecule just to name a small few are elements of science that have propagated in popular culture--even to those of us who never really participate in process, and, yes, even those of us who reject many of the conclusions of science.
My job here is to communicate--to make science accessible, interesting, and relevant. I produce short posts that introduce a scientific topic, its history, its conclusions, and its impact on society. I will do this primarily by discussing the people and their works, including some of the detail of the science itself. This is not intended to be just a biography; I want to communicate the concepts within the context of these lives. Sometimes I will write about one individual, and other times I may need to focus on a group of scientists.
With a natural starting-point for my first series, I will briefly explore the history and origins of scientific thought itself.
Not a whole lot of detail is known about scientific investigation in the ancient worlds. The few existing records of the earliest precepts of science from various ancient worlds and times focus mainly on nature--attempts to explain the Earth and Sky. A handful of Ancient Egyptian texts (c. 1600 BCE) describe medical diagnosis and treatment of physical trauma, including basic surgeries and several magic spells. Babylonian astronomers of Mesopotamia, by around c. 500 BCE, had established a famously robust mathematical description of celestial movements. However, these disparate fields of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, medicine, and engineering were not understood at that time as analytically related until developments in Ancient Greece.
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| The Edwin Smith Papyrus describes basic surgeries. |
The first abstract discussion on matters of the natural world came from Ancient Greece, in what is known as the pre-Socratic traditions (roughly 625 - 400 BCE). The most famous of the Greek philosophers predating Socrates was the earliest of the traditional Seven Sages of Greece, called Thales (THAY-leez).
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| Sketch rendering of Thales of Miletus |
Not much of Thales survives today, and most of what we do know is second-hand descriptions from later Ancient Greeks thinkers, particularly Aristotle. (We will see plenty of references to Aristotle in coming discussions.) Thales, we can say with some certainty, lived from the mid-620s BCE until the mid-540s BCE. He was born, probably to an aristocratic family, in Miletus, an Ionian Greek seaside town in what is now southeast Turkey, and was educated by Egyptian priests.
Accounts of Thales depict a bold, confident, slyly intelligent man. He once allegedly made a fortune buying and selling olive presses in order to boast his ability to predict growing-season weather. He was involved in politics and warfare, counselling the establishment of a central government for the Ionian people, and helping instruct leaders on defending their lands from invading Persians. (Accounts are not clear whether Thales began his work on naturalism during or after his political career.) One story has that Thales accurately predicted a solar eclipse on a day of a battle, which, in awe, caused the combating sides to lay a ceasefire. Thales was also a noted geometer, skilled in his understanding of similar triangles and their angles. (There are today two separate geometric theorems that are sometimes called “Thales’ Theorem”.) Thales was also supposedly absent-minded, and once got himself trapped in a well because he was not paying attention to his way. Whether these tales reflect reality or a mythologizing of the man is anyone’s guess.
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| One of Thales’ Theorems states that drawing two straight lines from any point on the edge of a semi-circle to the corners will invariably result in the creation of a 90-degree angle. |
As evidenced from their many noted Olympian myths, the Ancient Greeks tended to explain the occurrence of natural phenomena with reference to gods and heroes. Thales instead, attempted to elucidate natural processes in and of themselves. His legacy was that he was perhaps the first scholar to firmly reject supernatural explanations of phenomena, and it is in this regard that Thales has earned his superlative as the Father of Science. Some ideas in medicine, mathematics, and astronomy had already existed, but Thales was the first to unite these things under a new concept of analytic explanation.
Thales and his successors tackled questions such as from where, and from what, matter arises, and how we can explain why matter exists in many different forms. The problem with the Greek naturalists from a perspective of modern science is that they generally attempted to explain their observations of nature from a basis of intuition, not investigation. Intuition, unfortunately, has proven time-and-again to be an extremely poor method for describing phenomena in the Universe. (After all, how many of us would have simply guessed by our intuition the existence of, say, plate tectonics?)
Although Thales rejected supernatural explanations, postulations attributed to him include that all matter is composed living beings (this theory was inspired by his observations on magnets), that all matter derives from water as the sort of “parent”, or that earthquakes are caused by floating land pitching and turning on waves of water. Even the famous Ancient Greek postulation of the existence of atoms elaborated by the philosopher Democritus was based on speculation, not any particular evidence. (The fact that he was indeed correct about the existence of atoms might be seen as somewhat lucky.) The great Aristotle, famous for his advocacy of empiricism, was not immune, writing “intuition will be the source of scientific knowledge.”
The next important development in science, therefore, would be the departure from intuitive reasoning, and the rise of experimentation. The first scholar of note to write a refutation of Greek techniques of reasoning came more than 1,000 years later, in Iraq.
Important ideas:
- The Greek philosopher Thales delivered an important conceptual breakthrough in his attempts to explain the world only in terms of natural occurrences.
- The Ancient Greeks employed intuitive reasoning--essentially “educated guessing”--which we now say is a flawed method for conducting most science.
Other interesting reading:
- Look into Democritus of Abdera, also sometimes called a “Father Of Science”, a man whom the great philosopher Plato despised so greatly that he passionately recommended all of Democritus’ work destroyed.
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