Re: The origin of science

From: Arturo Magidin (magidin_at_math.berkeley.edu)
Date: 03/23/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 20:50:00 +0000 (UTC)

In article <d1sk51$84c@odds.stat.purdue.edu>,
Herman Rubin <hrubin@odds.stat.purdue.edu> wrote:
>
>Did science flourish any more in Greece than in Egypt or
>Babylonia or India or China? In fact, the Greeks tended
>to avoid observational science, believing that it could
>all be deduced logically.

I thought there were two streams of greek science, one of them being
the one you describe, this branch eventually finding its greatest
expression with Aristotle, but also a second stream that died out
which ->was<- experimentalist. Erastosthenes and others who had an
empirical, observational, and experimental approach. (Erastosthenes
measured the circumferece of the Earth by measuring the distance from
Aswan to Alexandria, having verified that the sun cast no shadows at
the summer solstice in the former and measuring the angle from the
vertical in Alexandria at the solstice.

>What the Greeks did was to introduce the idea of proceeding
>from axioms to conclusions.

That too... A lot of the previous achievements seem to have been
misunderstood by the Romans (or simply ignored since they couldn't
quite "get" it; Pliny completely mangles the account of Erastosthenes
measurement, for example). 

-- 
======================================================================
"It's not denial. I'm just very selective about
 what I accept as reality."
    --- Calvin ("Calvin and Hobbes")
======================================================================
Arturo Magidin
magidin@math.berkeley.edu

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