Introduction
The Hellenistic scientific revolution was forgotten precisely because that scientific method was abandoned in antiquity and its recovery was exceedingly slow. For example, coming back to mathematics, Newton was still far below the Hellenistic level of rigor, as evident from comparing his argument about the ratio of infinitesimal quantities (Principia, I.I) with Archimedes’ work On Spirals, where infinitesimals of different orders are introduced: in essence, Newton lacked the limit concept which Archimedes possessed. The full recovery of the Hellenistic way of doing mathematics had to wait for Cauchy and Weierstrass...
What about the general and steady (on the average) impoverishment of Hellenistic science under the Roman empire? This is a major historical problem, strongly tied to the even bigger one of the decline and fall of the antique civilization itself. I would summarize the author’s argument by saying that it basically represents an application to science of a widely accepted general theory on decadence of antique civilization going back to Max Weber. Roman society, mainly based on slave labor, underwent an ultimately unrecoverable crisis as the traditional sources of that labor force, essentially wars, progressively dried up. To save basic farming, the remaining slaves were promoted to be serfs, and poor free peasants reduced to serfdom, but this made trade disappear. A society in which production is almost entirely based on serfdom and with no trade clearly has very little need of culture, including science and technology. As Max Weber pointed out, when trade vanished, so did the marble splendor of the ancient towns, as well as the spiritual assets that went with it: art, literature, science, and sophisticated commercial laws. The recovery of Hellenistic science then had to wait until the disappearance of serfdom at the end of the Middle Ages. To quote Max Weber: “Only then with renewed vigor did the old giant rise up again.”
The same scientific method characterizes the investigations in biomedical sciences (here the main For example, Scholia, related to the various writing stages of Philisophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica; figure is Herophilus of Chalcedon, who developed a theory, very much like our modern ones, of human anatomy and physiology, discovered the nervous system, and made a distinction between sensors and motors), in economics and mass production techniques, in architecture and urban development, and in cognitive sciences. Taken as a whole, the scientific methods characterized Hellenistic civilization, which underwent a major crisis in 145–144 B.C. (under Roman pressure after the subjugation of Macedonia and the destruction of Carthage) and later a slow but steady decline during its forced integration into the Roman state, concluded in 30 B.C. with the reduction of Egypt to a Roman province. However, Alexandria maintained its role as the scientific capital of antiquity (with a partial recovery in the second century A.D., the time of the mathematician and mechanical engineer Heron, the physician Galenus, and the astronomer Claude Ptolemy) well into the fifth century A.D. To fix the time scale, note that the rise, decline, partial recovery, and fall of Alexandrine science took more than seven centuries. Before turning to the question of the decline of Hellenistic science, I come back to the new light shed by the book on Euclid’s Elements and on pre-Ptolemaic astronomy. Euclid’s definitions of the elementary geometric entities—point, straight line, plane—at the beginning of the Elements have long presented a problem. Their nature is in sharp contrast with the approach taken in the rest of the book, and continued by mathematicians ever since, of refraining from defining the fundamental entities explicitly but limiting themselves to postulating the properties which they enjoy. Why should Euclid be so hopelessly obscure right at the beginning and so smooth just after? The answer is: the definitions are not Euclid’s. Toward the beginning of the second century A.D. Heron of Alexandria found it convenient to introduce definitions of the elementary objects (a sign of decadence!) in his commentary on Euclid’s Elements, which had been written at least 400 years before. All manuscripts of the Elements copied ever since included Heron’s definitions without mention, whence their attribution to Euclid himself. The philological evidence leading to this conclusion is quite convincing.
Review by Sandro Graffi of “ La Rivoluzione Dimenticata” (The Forgotten Revolution) Lucio Russo Feltrinelli, Milan, 1996 ( PDF File 150 kB )
In
all history, nothing is so surpassing or so difficult to account for
as the sudden rise of the civilization in Greece. Much of what makes
civilization had already existed of thousand of years in Egypt and in
Mesopotamia, and had spread thence to neighboring countries. But
certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied them.
What they achieved in art and literature is familiar to everybody,
but what they did in the purely intellectual realm is even more
exceptional.
Bertrand Russel,
History of the western philosophy
The work
of Newton can not be understood without a knowledge of antique
science. Without the stupendous work of Ptolemy, which completed and
closed antique astronomy, Kepler’s Astronomia nova,and hence
the mechanics of Newton, would have been impossible.
Without the
conic sections of Apollonius, which Newton knew
thoroughly, his development of the law of gravitation is equally
unthinkable. And Newton’s integral calculus can be understood
only as a continuation of Archimedes’ determination of areas
and volumes. The history of mechanics as an exact science begins with
the laws of the lever, the laws of hydrostatics and the determination
of mass centers by Archimedes.
In short, all the developments
which converge in the work of Newton, those of mathematics, of
mechanics and of astronomy, begin in Greece.
Van
der Waerden -
Science awakening
If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants.
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
Ancient Greeks “discovered” science:
...because they introduced the notions of
natural causality and rational proof; because they tried to eliminate
what they considered to be supernatural elements from their
explanations for natural phenomena, because they made (often
unobserved and sometimes unobservable) connections between phenomena
and ordered them into parts and wholes or causes and effects (rather
than just amassed observations), and because they tried to think
their way rationally (which does not mean logically or sensibly to
modern tastes) through the perceived order of observed phenomena. The
belief in natural causation with consequent natural effects was
matched by a belief that knowledge precedes by reasoning from
intellectual premise to rational conclusion.
Sambursky
Samuel The physical world of the Greeks
The rational laws of proportion, order, clarity, and balance that were developed during the golden age of Greece continue to influence western art: the belief and dignity of the individual human; the interest in the natural world; a commitment to standards of perfection; and a balance of stasis and movement.
But there are also critical comments:
... the main interest of the work (Aristotle's Meteorologica) is to be found not so much in any particular conclusions which Aristotle reaches, as in the fact that all his conclusions are so far wrong and in his lack of a method which could lead him to right ones. In this he is typical of Greek science. The comparative failure of the Greeks to develop experimental science was due to many causes, which cannot be considered here. They lacked instruments of precision -- there were, for instance, no accurate clocks until Galileo discovered the pendulum. They did not produce until a comparatively late date any glass suitable for chemical experiment or lens making. Their iron-making technique was elementary, which precluded the development of the machine. Their mathematical notation was clumsy and unsulted to scientific calculation. All these things would have severely limited the development of an experimental science had the Greeks fully grasped its method. But the experimental method eluded them. They observed but they did no experiment, and between observation and experiment there is a fundamental difference which it is essential to recognize if the history of Greek thought is to be understood. This difference can be essentially seen in the Meteorologica. There is plenty of observation: Books 1-3 are full of it, and Book 4 shows a keen observation of the processes of the kitchen and garden in terms of which Aristotle tries to explain chemical change in general. But there is practically no experiment, and in those experiments which Aristotle does quote the results given are wrong. A good example of his attitude and method is the theory of exhalations which plays so prominent part in Books 1 and 2. It has a basis in observation: Aristotle had obviously observed the phenomena of evaporation. Yet not only has it no basis in experiment but it is not designed to be verified experimentally, nor is it easy to conceive all experiment which could either confirm or invalidate it. It is this absence of the awareness for the necessity of an experimental test that is the mark of thought that is rational but not yet scientific, of the natural philosopher rather than the natural scientist. And of Aristotle's natural philosophy and of Greek natural philosophy in general it is true that it "roamed rational without being scientific, that it never passed from natural philosophy to nature science. There are, of course, exceptions both in Aristotle and elsewhere in Greek thought Greek medicine comes very near to being scientific, so also do Aristotle's biological works and the Greeks made further progress in astronomy than in ally of the other physics sciences, though this was just because their astronomy involved no experiment, but only observation and mathematical calculation. But these are exceptions. Of the more generally tendency the Meteorologica is typical; it is the product of the natural philosopher and not the natural science. H. D. P. Lee, Aristotle Meteorologica, London Cambridge,Mass. 1952.
References
Russo Lucio, Levy Silvio (translator), The Forgotten Revolution How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn, Springer, 2004, IX, 487 p., ISBN: 3-540-20068-1
Links
In Search of Excellence: Historical Roots of Greek Culture
Back to other interesting ancient Greece facts and stories
Update 18-3-2004
Counter Start 18-3-2004