|
|
Griechische Wissenschaft Zeitlinie 1184 BC Aeschylus writes in Agamemnon that smoke signals were used to send the message from Troy to the city Argos of the victory by the Greeks 1100-800 BC Dark Ages in Greece, Mycenian civilization decline, Invasion of Dorians and Ionians 800 BC 800-701 BC 776 BC
About 700 BC Development of Biremes Ships. 700-601 BC Glaucus of Chios invents soldering of iron. "His gifts, which he sent on recovering from his sickness, were a great bowl of pure silver, with a salver in steel curiously inlaid, a work among all the offerings at Delphi the best worth looking at. Glaucus, the Chian, made it, the man who first invented the art of inlaying steel". Herodotus, Book 1.
688 BC Boxing added to Olympic discipline
650 BC Development of Triremes Ships. Although the invention could be around 700 BC. Ameinocles the Corinthian, to whom this invention is ascribed, made the Samians acquainted with it (Thucyd. i.13; Plin.H.N.vii.57) but triremes were used only later. 624 BC Horse Racing added to Olympic discipline Around 600 BC About 600 BC Thales of Miletus (Θαλής ο Μιλήσιος ) arguing from the fact that wherever there is life, there is moisture, speculated that the basic stuff of nature is water, according to Aristotle. He brings Babylonian mathematical knowledge to Greece and uses geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. Greek philosophers describe magnetic properties of lodestones (ferric ferrite) About 600 -501 BC Theodorus of Samos credited with invention of ore smelting and casting, water level, lock and key, carpenter's square, and turning lathe. First water supply system in Athens has nine pipes leading to main well. Alcmaeon of Croton (Αλκμαίων ο Κροτωνιάτης ) Greek anatomist, discovers difference between veins and arteries, also connection between brain and sensing organs. About 585 BC Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse.
About 560 BC Anaximander (Αναξίμανδρος ο Μιλήσιος ) a monist of Miletus like Thales, said that the primal substance, the substratum of the opposites, the originative stuff, is the apeiron, which seems to have meant, at that time, the spatially indefinite or unbounded (Kirk et al. 1983:110). He proposes that the Earth surface is cylindrical (Anaximander's Cosmos ) “author of the first geometrical model of the world...” Charles Kahn Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology About 530 BC Pythagoras (Πυθαγόρας ο Σάμιος ) discovered the dependence of musical intervals on the arithmetical ratios of the lengths of string at the same tension, 2:1 giving an octave, 3:2 the fifth, and 4:3 the fourth. He is also credited with a general formula for finding two square numbers the sum of which is also a square, namely (if m is any odd number), m2+{1/2(m2-1)}2={1/2(m2+1)}2. "The Pythagoreans and Plato [as well as the Renaissance Neo-Platonists] noted that the conclusions they reached deductively agreed to a remarkable extent with the results of observation and inductive inference. Unable to account otherwise for this agreement, they were led to regard mathematics as the study of ultimate, eternal reality, immanent in nature and the universe, rather than as a branch of logic or a tool of science and technology" (Boyer 1949:1). Consequently, when the Pythagoreans developed the theory of geometric magnitudes, by which they were able to compare two surfaces' ratio, they were led, for lack of a system which could handle irrational numbers, to the 'incommensurability problem': Applying the side of a square to the diagonal, no common rational measure is discoverable. Pythagoras proposes that sound is a vibration of air. About 510 BC About 500 BC
Hecataeus (Εκαταίος) (c. -549 to c. -486) mentions India in his writings About 500 BC About 500 BC About 480 BC Corollary to Parmenides' rejection of the existence of 'nothing' is the Greek number system which, like the later Roman system, refused to use the Babylonian positional number system with its marker for 'nothing.' Making no clear distinction between nature and geometry, "mathematics, instead of being a science of possible relations, was to [the Greeks] the study of situations thought to subsist in nature" (Boyer 1949:25). Moreover, "almost everything in [Greek] philosophy became subordinated to the problem of change.... All temporal changes observed by the senses were mere permutations and combinations of 'eternal principles,' [and] the historical sequence of events (which formed part of the 'flux') lost all fundamental significance" (Toulmin and Goodfield 1965:40). Death of Pythagoras 479-431 BC Golden Age of Athens About 465 BC About 450 BC About 450 BC About 450 BC About 450 BC About 440 BC Protagoras of Abdera held that man is the measure of all things by which he meant that we only know what we perceive, not the thing perceived (Dictionary of Philosophy 1984:273). Oenopides of Chios (Οινοπίδης ο Χίος) probably created the first three of what became Euclid's 'postulates' or assumptions. What is postulated guarantees the existence of straight lines, circles, and points of intersection. That they needed to be postulated is because they require 'movement,' the possibility of which was challenged by the Eleatics (Szabó 1978:276-279). Indirect lost wax process for casting bronze Hippocrates of Cos, also locating thought, pleasure, and pain in the brain, maintained that diseases have natural causes, and observed that head injuries led to impairments on the opposite side of the body. The 'Hippocratic method' of treatment of the sick was to keep the patient in bed and let nature take its course. About 430-440 BC Hippias of Elis (Ιππίας ο Ηλείος) invents the quadratrix which may have been used by him for trisecting an angle and squaring the circle. Prior to about 425 BC About 425 BC Thebans use a flame-thrower at Delium. About 420 BC Democritus of Abdera (Δημόκριτος ο Αβδηρίτης) developed Leucippus's atomic theory: Atoms vibrate when hitched together in solid bodies and exist in a space which is infinite in extent and in which each star is a sun and has its own world. He also produced two major concepts in the history of ideas concerning the brain--that thought was situated there and, anticipating the nervous system, that psychic atoms constituted the material basis of its communication with the rest of the body and the world outside. Socrates, and hence the Platonic school, followed Democritus in locating thought in the brain. About 440 BC An arrow-shooting catapult was developed at Syracuse. Its main significance is that it "embodied the deliberate exploration of physical and mechanical principles to improve armaments" (O'Connell 2002:86) Also gastraphetes (belly shooter), early large crossbow, used as heavy artillery About 387 BC After about 380 BC Plato said, in the Timaeus, that "as being is to becoming, so is truth to belief" (Plato 1929:29c). In other words, we can only believe, not know, on the basis of experience. Like, Parmenides, he held being and truth, indeed the world, to be timeless and unchanging, an ideal of which man can only hold the idea. This permitted him a certain amount of flexibility: He was willing to accept objections to his view of the universe, for example, if the new hypothesis would provide a rational explanation or 'save the appearance' presented by the planets. In the Timaeus, he also held that the 'world soul' was constructed according to mathematical principles, and, therefore, these principles are already fixed in the individual. (Forms or ideas that have existence independent of any particular mind came to be called archetypes.) He scattered reflections on mathematical issues throughout his dialogues; e.g., in the Meno, he illustrates the difference between a class and its members by reference to the difference between defining 'figure' and enumerating specific figures. References to ratios and proportions are everywhere. The five regular polygons he ascribed to the four elements plus the "decoration" of the universe (Plato 1929:55c), probably the animals of the zodiac. About 375 BC About 370-360 BC About 340 BC About 335 BC Aristotle settles in Athens, founds Lyceum. He said that universals are abstractions from particulars and that we "have knowledge of a scientific fact when we can prove that it could not be otherwise." But "since observation never shows whether this is the case," he established "reason rather observation at the center of scientific effort" (Park 1990:32). A deductive argument is "a 'demonstration' when the premises from which the reasoning starts are true and primary.... Things are 'true' and 'primary' which are believed on the strength not of anything else but themselves" (Aristotle 1928:100a-100b). Aristotle defined the syllogism as a formal argument in which the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, and said that the four most common statements of this sort are 'all Subject is Predicate,' 'no S is P,' 'some S is P,' and 'some S is not P.' He also discerned four sorts of 'cause.' The 'formal cause' is the design of a thing. The 'material cause' is that of which it is made. The 'efficient cause' is the maker. And the 'final cause' is the purpose of the thing. Aristotle also insisted on the operational character of mathematics and rejected any metaphysical character of number. At the same time, Aristotle often states both his observations and his reasons with rather too much conviction: "The shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical; for that is the shape most appropriate to its substance and also by nature primary" (Aristotle 1930:286b). "A heavenly essence could not, according to [his] physics, manifest any but its own 'natural' movement, and its only natural movement [so his reason informed him] was a uniform rotation around the center of the universe" (Duhem 1908:15). His name for the heavenly essence, the quintessence, is aiqhr, of which the Latin cognate is 'aether' (Although Aristotle is perhaps the earliest theorist of aiqhr, he was not the first to use the word, e.g., Heraclitus used it to mean heavenly fire.) In fact, "in dealing with [any] concrete, physical problem, it is...always necessary to take into account the world order, to consider the realm of being to which a given body belongs by its nature.... It is only in 'its' place that a being comes to its accomplishment and becomes truly itself" (Koyré 1968:6,24n1). He also put forth the view that each species has an essence and that divergence from this type was not possible beyond a certain limit. These remained the dominant views until the acceptance of those of Johannes Kepler, in the first case, and Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, in the second. If the properties of a thing are its 'form,' then, according to Aristotle, perception is the process whereby the form, and not just the representation of it, enters the soul. This account of perception "was taken as the exact, literal truth by almost every educated person down to the sixteenth century" (Park 1990:44). Also. Aristotle "considered the changes undergone by inanimate things to be analogous to those seen in the biological world. Thus grape juice is the infantile form of wine, fermentation is the process of maturation; the further change to vinegar is the death of the wine" (Fruton 1972:24). Since all matter is formed from the mixture of the four elements, he taught the elements are not permanent and could be transmuted one into another, inspiring all who practice alchemy. After weighing the evidence, Aristotle decided that the organ of thought and sensation was the heart. But he was also the first to perceive the antithesis between epigenesis, "fresh development," and preformation, the "simple unfolding of pre-existing structures." The subsequent history of this controversy is "almost synonymous with the history of embryology" (Needham 1934:40). About 335 BC About 330 BC Pytheas navigated the British Isles and the northern seas and upon returning home wrote about an island that he called Thule or Ultima Thule Aristotle, describes image projection in terms of the camera obscura 327-323 Alexander; military campaigns throughout Asia Minor and as far east as India. Throughout this period he sent plants and various objects to the Lyceum About 325 BC Pytheas, tides are caused by moon Androsthenes of Thasos was the lucky one who … discovered for the first time the important fact that plants are capable of movement, a characteristic previously attributed only to the animal world. Like all scientifi c observations which were ordered by Alexander the Great himself, the description of the daily periodic [italics Bretzl’s] movements of the leafl ets in their four stages is written so clearly and so succinctly that until the time of our new physiological works, it remains the best (description) of the sleep of plants, even if they are not noted and forgotten, as a historical review will describe. Bretzl H. Botanische Forschungen des Alexanderzuges. B.G. Teubner, Leipzig, 1903, pp. 120-132. 323 BC About 330-310 BC 330 BC ?? 322 BC About 320 BC About 314 BC The first reference to the pyroelectric effect by Theophrastus who noted that tourmaline becomes charged when heated. About 300 BC Eukleides, better known as Euclid, published his Elements, a reorganized compilation of geometrical proofs including new proofs and a much earlier essay on the foundations of arithmetic. Elements conclude with the construction of Plato's five regular solids. Euclidean space has no natural edge, and is thus infinite. In his Optica, he noted that light travels in straight lines and described the law of reflection. About 300 BC Dicaiarch of Messina (350-290 BCE), Greek geographer introduces to the map making world the notion of latitude and longitude About 290-260 BC 288-287 BC 287 BC 285 BC Philetas of Cos - died from considering the Liar Paradox. About 280 BC About 280 BC The Greek Ctesibius of Alexandria invents the hydraulic organ, the hydraulis. The Stoics invent The Crocodile and Baby Paradox. 276 BC About 270 BC Death of Euclid About 260-250 BC Archimedes of Syracuse contributed numerous advances to science including the principle that a body immersed in fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid and the calculation of the value of pi. "His method was to select definite and limited problems. He then formulated hypotheses which he either regarded, in the Euclidean manner, as self-evident axioms or could verify by simple experiments. The consequences of these he then deduced and experimentally verified" (Crombie 1952:278). Description of the Loculus of Archimedes; Archimedean Polyhedra; Volume of Intersection of Two Cylinders; Archimedes' Cattle Problem. Principle of the lever , discovery of the principle of buoyancy Erasistratus of Alexandria ((Ερασίστρατος ο Κείος)) dissected the brain and distinguished between the cerebrum and the cerebellum. About 250 BC About 245 BC About 240 BC About 230 BC About 230 BC Before the end of the third century BC In the early second century BC About 225-210 BC? About 225 BC Around 212 BC Around 200-300 BC Around 200 BC About 170 BC About 150 BC About 134-127 BC Hipparchus of Rhodes (Ιππαρχος ο Ρόδιος ) measured the year with great accuracy and built the first comprehensive star chart with 850 stars and a luminosity, or brightness, scale. He is credited with the discovery of the precision of the equinoxes, and seems to have been very impressed that either of two geometrically constructed hypotheses could 'save the appearance' of the path that a planet follows: One shows the planets moving in eccentric circles and the other moving in epicycles carried by concentric circles (Duhem 1908:8). In the first half of the first century BC 45 BC Late first century BC 65-80 BC 50 AD About 60 About 50-70 AD About 90 About 100[?] About 110 Between 127 and 141 Claudius Ptolemaeus (Πτολεμαίος Κλαύδιος) better known as Ptolemy, put together a thirteen volume compendium of opinion and data concerning the stars, including the Mesopotamian eclipse record. In this book, the Almagest, Ptolemy rejected the Peripatetic physics of the heavens, using circles rather than spheres. He did so in order to simplify his calculations, judging the circles to be only models devised for the purpose of calculation and recognizing that the actual movements were unknowable. The Almagest also contains errors which were not corrected until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: e.g., saying that the earth is the center of the universe, the planets have circular, if eccentric, orbits, and the earth does not move--because the centrifugal force would cause anything even temporarily disconnected to lag behind. On the other hand, the tables of the planet's positions were of such accuracy that Nicholas Copernicus computed most of his numbers from them. He also tabulates angles of refraction for several media. About 160 The first Science Fiction Story by Lucian of Samosata that described kidnapping by extraterrestrials, star wars, trip to the moon! In the story Menippus meets Endymion who explains that he was kidnapped and brought to the moon while he slept. He adds that he is about to make war on the People of the Sun, whose King Phaethon has refused to allow him to colonize Venus. In the titanic struggle which follows, the People of the Sun are at last victorious and the triumphant Phaethon builds a high wall which prevents the light from his domain from reaching the moon, thus causing a total eclipse....
About 170 Claudius Galen (Γαληνός Κλαύδιος ) used pulse taking as a diagnostic, performed numerous animal dissections, and wrote treatises on anatomy aid. The Galenic doctrine assumed that health depends on a balance of affinities or antagonisms associated with various bodily fluids or 'humors:' blood and fire (hot and dry), yellow bile and air (hot and wet), black bile and earth (cold and dry), and phlegm and water (cold and wet). "The object of good medical practice...was to restore the balance of the humors by such treatment as bleeding or purgation with plant extracts" (Fruton 1972:27). Galen eskewed 'action at a distance' through the agency of gods or spirits, in his formulas he employed many odd ingredients, such as crocodile blood and mouse dung. But, if he can, he relates the efficacy to some mechanism: for example, for a root worn around the neck, inhalation of the particles of the root. He distinguished three ventricles and proposed that nerves are ducts conveying fluid pneuma secreted by the brain and spinal cord to the periphery of the body, which was the basis of the idea, widespread until the eighteenth century, that nervous tissue had a glandular function He broke pneuma, which means spirit or soul in Greek, down into various faculties, motor, sensory including the five senses, and rational. He divided the rational pneuma into several functions, imagination, reason, and memory. He also wrote of 'seeds of disease,' presumably what are now called germs. Pausanias of Magnesia writes "Periegesis," a guide through Greece and its history of art (10 vols.) Ptolemy draws 26 maps of various countries About 250 About 300 About 301 About 325 Middle of the third century In the late third century About 385 Aurelius Augustinus, later known as Augustine, a Christian saint, writing in Latin, found the Platonist notion of eternal ideas a certain basis for knowledge which he promulgated in his books Confessiones and Civitas Dei. [["The fourth and fifth centuries saw the intellectual triumph of [Roman] Christianity in Europe.... In 389 Christian monks sacked the great Greek library in Alexandria.... Since Greek was the language of a literature whose most famous works expressed a pagan culture [and] by 425 Saint Jerome's [official Latin or] Vulgate Bible was being copied and distributed..., Western scholars no longer needed Hebrew or Greek" (Park 1990:78-79).]] About 390 About 400 References Boyer, Carl B. 1949. The History of Calculus and Its Conceptual Development. New York: Dover Publications. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/index.html
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn Russo Lucio, Levy Silvio (translator), Springer, 2004, IX, 487 p., ISBN: 3-540-20068-1
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||