Notes on Greek Science

1. In the ancient near east and Homeric Greece we find a high level of observation, but explanations are typically also associated with magic; that is, observation is really an attempt to read natural signs as revealing the will of the gods.
2. Among the early Greek cosmologists, there is a critical shift that we associate with the beginning of science; namely the cosmologists attempt to read natural events without reference to the gods (non-theological explanations). They assume / believe that there is order (kosmos) and that humans can articulate what that order is.
3. Though this was a fundamentally different insight, it did not lead to complete "scientific" system of explanation. Several things had to happen and they did not happen all at once. Indeed, the development of a vocabulary and of a recognizable methodology took centuries, and in the case of measurement and devises to measure, more than a millenium.
   1. The greeks had to develop a conceptual vocabulary that did not include the gods (6th Cent., BC. More difficult than it sounds, for language was truly literary. Hence they typically recorded their thoughts in verse (as did Empedocles) and used a poetic vocabulary (e.g.., Love, as used in the Aristotle passage) to describe phenomena. Eventually more "scientific" words were introduced and accepted, e.g., "attraction" (which still has two meaning, one emotional and the other scientific). Even today scientists must develop new terms to describe new phenomena --and note how words of Latin and Greek origin are employed for this purpose (Super Nova --Latin).
   2. For the new words to be accepted there had to be public discourse; a key characteristic of the Greek city state. How do we know that such discourse existed in the 5th Century BC)?
      1. The cosmologists as distant as Sicily and Ionia (western Turkey) critiqued the views of one another. They could only do this if the had access to the ideas of others.
      2. In a famous passage on the flood of the Nile, Herodotus states that Greek cosmologists got "a reputation for cleverness" by proposing schemes to account for the fact that the Nile flooded in high summer instead of winter
      3. The comic poet, Aristophanes, satirizes the views of the cosmologists in his play, Clouds; satire can only work if everyone understands the nature of the discussion.
   3. Public discussion and criticism forced the Greek cosmologists to think about both the method and verification, namely how does one demonstrate a proposition, and ultimately that the demonstration / proposition must be verified by others. Again, it took centuries before the "scientific method" was articulated in a defining by by Aristotle (late 4thCent., BC). Aristotle does propose a general cosmological system, one that was plausible in that it accounted for most observations, most of the time. Nonetheless there were some very disturbing observations that were inconsistent with the system and could not be denied. Much of ancient science is devote to reconciled those discrepancies. That is, the general plausibility of the Aristotelian system was superior to any other proposal.
   4. A major constraint on this process was of course the lack of a standard of measurement and of devises for doing so. The gnomon (the upright stick of the sundial) provides indications but is not exact. Given the primitive instrumentation, the level of observation was high, but the ability to verify in any modern or even early modern sense hardly possible. Note the differences between what the Hippocratic writers do in the 5th Cent., BC and what Galen does in the 2nd Cent., AD).
4. What then was the achievement of the Greeks in respect to science??