The Creation of Science

It was, then, the ancient Greeks who were the originators of science, although not, it must be said, without considerable contributions from other cultures. But it was the Greeks who took the technologies of earlier civilisations, most notably those of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, and turned them into science. Equally, there have been other contributors to the tradition which has led to modern science. The Arabic/Islamic culture did a great deal to preserve, and then extend and transform, Greek scientific thinking during and after the decline of the Roman empire. Much of this was transmitted to the West, helping to rouse it from the dark ages and push it on towards the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. The Romans contributed a great deal of technology, even if their scientific achievements were meagre. Technology and scientific ideas from China, travelling to the West along the trade routes, were also important influences for Western science.

The ultimate origins of science lay with the Greeks, though. They rejected explanation in terms of myths and capricious gods, and considered their cosmos to be an entirely natural and well-ordered place. In distinguishing between the natural and the supernatural, they effectively discovered nature. They began to use theories to describe and understand their cosmos. These theories were couched in natural terms, and importantly could be discussed and improved upon in ways that myths could not. It is the rapid increase in the sophistication of their theories that is perhaps the most remarkable thing about the ancient Greeks. Wherever one looks – in cosmology, theory of matter, medicine – one sees them making huge conceptual leaps and arriving at new, better theories. We can also see the Greeks developing means to resolve debates about theories and being conscious of a distinction between science and technology.

That is what happened among the early Greeks to establish science. We might also ask: why did science begin with the ancient Greeks? Why, in particular, did science begin with the Milesians? To say that there was a Greek ‘miracle’ which brought about the birth of both science and philosophy would not explain anything, and would ignore one of the key lessons of the Milesians. While the Milesians achieved a good deal, it is important to put their achievement into perspective. They neither created science from scratch, nor produced the finished article. They were considerably indebted to other civilisations, especially the Babylonians and the Egyptians. One of the most important things about the Milesians was not the actual quality of their theories, but that they conceived of the idea of a cosmos as an orderly and natural place which could be explained by theories. This, along with the intellectual and religious toleration of ancient Greece, allowed Greek science and philosophy to develop rapidly. The other pre-Socratics, then Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic thinkers carried forward this programme of explaining the cosmos in natural terms. The Greek achievement was the work of many hands over a great period of time. The contribution of the Milesians was good, and was seminal, but it was not miraculous. They themselves would have been the first to argue that.

The conditions which aided the Greeks were their lack of a central religion and hierarchical organisation, and freedom of expression, allied to a society affluent enough for some people to have the leisure time to investigate questions about the nature of the world. In addition, the technological bases in some disciplines (geometry, astronomy, medicine) were already in place, so the time for a transformation to science was ripe. Greek society, with its love of criticism, debate and knowledge for its own sake, proved to be an immensely fertile soil, once the seeds of science had been sown.

Greek science had distinctive strengths and weaknesses. In very broad outline, the great strengths and achievements were almost all intellectual and theoretical, the weaknesses mainly practical. The fact that Greek philosophy and science were so closely intertwined was a double-edged sword. It allowed the Greeks to develop what was so desperately needed – a natural conception of the world about us, and a theoretical framework for the sciences. It also allowed them to break with mythopoeic thought. The other side of this situation is that some, though by no means all, of these philosopher-scientists were interested only in the philosophical and theoretical aspects of science, and neglected the practical aspects.

Undoubtedly, the strongest areas of Greek science were those in which there was no need for observation, experiment or a strong link with technology, or in which, for some special reason, the Greeks inherited a good deal of empirical data or had no objection to gathering such data. So Greek mathematics and geometry were strong, because these disciplines, as conceived by the Greeks, did not require observation and experiment. Even here, though, the more theoretical work of the Greeks grew out of the practical mathematics and geometry drawn from Babylonian and Egyptian sources. Greek astronomy was strong, because it had access to Babylonian and Egyptian records, and observing the heavens was accepted as a dignified pursuit. Greek cosmogony and cosmology was also rich in ideas, if a little short on empirical confirmation of them (though, in fairness, cosmology really became an observational discipline only in the twentieth century). Greek medicine was relatively strong too, again partly because it inherited a good deal of practical knowledge from the Babylonians and Egyptians, and partly because medicine in ancient Greece was a highly competitive business. The Hippocratics needed to develop effective treatments, as far as was possible in the ancient world, and realised that to do so they must make careful observations, experiment with various possible treatments, and make full use of whatever technology of healing was available.

The major weakness in ancient Greek science was a lack of appreciation of the proper role of experiment, observation and technology. Experiment, to some extent, was seen as manual labour, and as such beneath the dignity of a ‘gentleman’ philosopher. Xenophon (c. 430–354 BC), a contemporary of Plato and Aristotle, said that:

What are called the mechanical arts are spoken against, and, naturally, are held in utter contempt in the cities. They ruin the bodies of the workmen and overseers, compelling them to be seated and to live in the shade, spending the day at the fire.

The Greeks were never particularly good at technology (the Romans were much better), nor did they develop a fruitful relationship between technology and science. The prime example is that of Hero’s engine. Hero invented a steam engine which could produce rotary motion. A crude, very low-powered engine, but an engine nevertheless. What did the Greeks think of this? Was it a source of power that could possibly be used in many situations? No. It was an interesting toy, a party-piece to impress people with. Because of this sort of attitude, the Greeks never put the necessary developmental work into their technology. They had no real appreciation that a fruitful liaison between science and technology could lead to inventions which would better the lot of society in general, and indeed would improve their science. Perhaps this was due to their slave-based culture (there was no need for labour-saving devices), or the stigma of manual work, or the nature of the aristocratic Greek philosophers. Whatever the answer, this was a weakness of Greek science.

There were also some more specific weaknesses. While the Greeks did many wonderful things in cosmogony and cosmology, there was a fundamental limitation which coloured all of their work. They never developed a conception of gravity. They were forced to explain its effects by means of other theories, and this affected the nature of all of those theories. From the early ‘parallel’ conception of the cosmos, to the ‘centrifocal’ conception, to the sophisticated ideas of later antiquity, the struggle to account for gravitational phenomena coloured Greek cosmology. Some of the Greeks believed in a like-to-like principle, while Aristotle’s theory of natural place came to be dominant. The Greeks had no proper conception of force as we understand it, nor did they develop the idea of relative motion. A combination of these factors led the Greeks to believe that the earth was immobile. They believed that if it moved there would be fierce winds; they could not see how it would hold together, nor why we would stick to its surface if it was in motion away from its natural place. Geocentrism created a problem for Greek astronomy. All of the motions of the heavenly bodies had to be real ones – some couldn’t be merely apparent, and due to the motion of the earth. This meant that the Greeks had to develop complex devices to generate the motions of the planets. While one can understand why the Greeks adopted geocentrism, this remained a weakness in their astronomy and cosmology.

Several of the ancient Greeks emphasised the need for mathematics in their understanding of the cosmos. However, it was by no means evident how mathematics related to the natural world, and the Greeks, except in a few isolated instances, never really employed the idea of mathematically formulated laws of nature. They were also too optimistic about how well-arranged life forms and the cosmos were, and too liberal with their use of teleology. There were reasons for these specific weaknesses, not least of which is that the Greeks were the pioneers of science, and science is not easy. Ideas such as universal gravitation do not come easily, as is evidenced by the fact that it took a further millennium after the end of Greek science for this idea to be formulated. Non-teleological accounts of the cosmos and of life processes require a great deal of sophistication to become plausible, and this has been achieved only in the last few hundred years. The weaknesses need to be placed in context against the great achievements and advances of Greek science, and the remarkable fact that the Greeks managed to get science off the ground at all. That cannot have been easy in a culture which still relied heavily on mythology and a theology of mischievous, interfering gods.

There are, of course, other important differences between modern and ancient science, particularly in terms of organisation and funding. Whereas science nowadays is funded by industry and the state, ancient research was carried out on a purely amateur basis by those with the interest, resources and leisure time to pursue it. Instead of the laboratory, university or research institute, the ancients had at best a crude observatory. The philosophical schools, such as the Academy or the Lyceum, important as they were, gave no support comparable to that which we can find in the modern world. The relationship between science and technology is now much tighter and much better understood, but was considered virtually irrelevant by the ancients. The number of people doing science in the ancient world was proportionally far smaller than nowadays, and it is always wise to remember that the history of Greek science is the history of a small but influential group of thinkers. Finally, we might compare the instruments available to the ancients with those nowadays. They had a few crude instruments for observing the heavens, but little else with which to investigate their world – no microscopes or telescopes, no thermometers, and only relatively primitive means of measuring distance and weight. Modern science depends on precision instruments to investigate accurately. The ancients were virtually devoid of these.

When summing up the work of the ancient Greeks, it is important to remember that prior to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, there was little reason to suppose that the mechanical and atomistic world view that came to prominence at that time was correct. There were many other possibilities, and because of the problems that mechanical and atomist accounts had in explaining how the order of the cosmos came about, and how life originated, the teleological accounts of Plato and Aristotle would have seemed at least as plausible to the ancients. In general, atomist and mechanical accounts were weak in antiquity, lacking as they did many modern resources. One result of this was some ancient attitudes to explanation. The ancients tended to have a more organic conception of the cosmos, use more organic metaphors and explain more holistically than we would, since, for them, this seemed a more convincing approach than attempting mechanical and atomistic explanations. It is also important to recognise the length of time involved with Greek science. We are talking of nearly a millennium, from around 600 BC to 200–300 AD. We would be very cautious in considering the science of the period from 1200 to the present day as one entity, and drawing general conclusions from it. We should be duly cautious of doing so with the Greeks as well. This is especially so given the diversity of thinkers and ideas that proliferated in ancient Greece.

Having said that, Greek science stands as one of the great achievements of the ancient world, and indeed one of the great achievements of humankind. To have begun science is remarkable enough in itself, but especially so in the ancient world. The vision and clarity of purpose of the ancient Greeks was exceptional, as was their tenacity in pursuing the view that the world is comprehensible and can be explained in a rational manner. The way in which Greek theories increase so rapidly in sophistication once they get the elements of science in place is astounding, and is comparable to any of the great periods of human intellectual endeavour, such as the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. They bequeathed a wealth of fascinating ideas and arguments about the nature of the physical world, many of which have been important in the development of science, and some of which are still relevant today. Above all, though, they gave us the basic structures and vision of science. That is something that stays with us as we find out more and more about the cosmos that we live in.