<Deleted…double post 
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-XT
Let’s not forget that Archimedes came infinitesimally close* to inventing the Calculus.
*couldn’t resist that one
Are you saying that Newton and Liebniz were derivative?
runs
Thanks for bringing back some bad memories of diffeq…
-XT
Apparently not:
Although, it seems that the history of concrete considerably predates even the Greeks:
The most important aspect of science is the way of thinking about the world. That is really the essence of science; not the actual results, but the steps you take to get there. The Ancient Greeks did systematic and analytical thought better than most people both before and after them. There’s a reason people looked back at the Greeks as living in a golden age. It took a long time for other civilizations to even match their achievements in engineering and philosophy, much less exceed them.
The Romans are sometimes characterized as being inferior to the Greeks despite their success in conquering and administrating a vast empire. Their contributions to the modern world were the ideas of standardization, uniformity, and practicality. The Romans weren’t noted so much for their original or creative thinking. They were kind of like the Japanese in modern business: take good ideas, refine them, make things more efficiently than the other guys, and slowly, step-by-step, expand until you command a superior position. In much the same way, today’s large corporations can often take over smaller companies whose innovations far outstrip their own simply because they command more resources, not because they are currently better at business or at producing better widgets in their industry than the more inventive company.
I got all the way to the last post before my post was stolen. Darn it!
Though their results may have been wrong, their results were consistent with the evidence they had. New evidence was, in general, accepted and accounted for. It is not so much science that we owe to the Greeks, but the scientific method.
No, they were definitely integral to the whole process. 
For an interesting take on the matter, this book posits an alternate world where the Ancient Greek understanding of science was, in fact, correct!
How “ancient” is ancient? If you’re willing to go up to the time of Christ and a couple centuries beyond you have Claudius Ptolemy and those of his bunch. Ptolemy measured the angles of incidence and refraction for light passing between water and air, g;lass and air, and glass and water. His values are very accurate (except near grazing incidence). were he not blinded by how close his fit was to a parabola, he might have formulated Snell’s law a millienium and a half earlier. (Despite what everyone says, he did not “get it right for small angles” – he got it close just about everywhere BUT at small angles, and if he’d examined it more closely, he’d probably have found his error) Ptolemy was in a unique position to be able to get Snell’s law – he’d composed the first table of sines we know of.
He also demonstrated the precession of the equinoxes. That’s no small achievement. He catalogued and noted the positions of the stars.
Alexander of Aphrodisias, onetime director of the Library at Alexandria, maqde many observations, including the feature of the rainbow still called Alexander’s Dark Band.
Archimedes has been mentioned. – many mechanical devices, the principle of displacement.
The Anikythera device, which shows knowledge both of gearing and mechanical computing and of the motions of the planets.
Hippocrates and medicine.
And don’t be so fast to put Aristotle down. He did have a tendency to be verbose and to make several profoundly wrong statements, which an exaggerated reverence for him kept perpetuating through the years. But he earned that reputation by making a great many correct observations. People don’t read him enough to appreciate that.
A guy named Michael Lahanas has a website listing Greek achievements in antiquity that’s worth a look:
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Greeks.htm
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Inventions.htm
Aristotle was a philosopher not a scientist. He liked to propose theories but he saw no reason to gather evidence - he figured the value of a theory lay more in how interesting it sounded rather than whether or not it was supported by the facts.
And Paul Chadwick invented Concrete.
With respect to Greek astronomy, Aristarchus of Samos accurately determined (from observation of lunar eclipses) that the distance from the Earth to the Moon was 30 times the diameter of the Earth.
It was obvious from solar eclipses that the Sun was even farther away–probably much farther–so the two results together gave the first hint of the enormity of the cosmos. Also, it followed that the Sun and Moon were quite large, the latter a respectable fraction of the size of the Earth and the former much larger.
This is so obvious that we take it for granted today, but it wasn’t obvious at all at the time–for all one can tell from casual observation, the Sun, Moon, and stars are little dots and circles just beyond the clouds.
I don’t think those modern categories are relevant to the ancient Greeks. It’s only recently that we invented the category of “scientist”.
Can you give some examples of this? Because, using Newton’s equations, I can predict to within a couple of millimeters where a ball will land when I know all of the initial conditions when it is tossed.
The whole idea that there is a deterministic outcome is wrong. It only works in the macro world because the probabilities of the equations being right are really, really high. But Quantum Mechanics tells us you can’t know all the initial conditions at the same time.
Several posters have given examples of things the Greeks “got right”, but acceptance of these depends on how “right” you need the Greeks to be. Erastothenes calculation of the earth’s circumference is a good example. The final figure is an approximation that could be off by as much as 17% (depending on the exact length of a stadium), so if you’re definition of “right” is “accurate results”, the correctness of the result is doubtable. However the description of his method–examining the angle of shadows in different parts of Greece–is “right” for the kind of measurement he was making, and in all aspects–development of a hypothesis, field measurements to test–is scientific.
Several posters have also demonstrated the differences in Greek philosophy and the scientific method; glibly, one can say the Greeks prized deductive methods over inductive ones, a hierarchy modern science reverses. Clearly, maintaning the Greek philosophy would not have produced the wonders of modern science, but it did give the Greeks some accomplishments to be proud of.
I guess it’s best to say the Greeks got some scientific things right by using their method (not strictly by chance), and that these shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they did not value the same things the modern scientific method does.
Nitpick: The Romans would have called it a “stadium”, but the Greeks would have called it a “stadion”.
Otherwise I pretty much agree with your post.
Didn’t papas discover how to calculate the columes of spheres? He was just a step away from the integarl calculus. Or the unknown genius who built the Atikythera mechanism-he/she was on par with our technology of about 1700 AD.
The real mystery-why didn’t the Greeks develop the science of physics, and apply their science to industry? Then we might have had the industrial revolution 200 years ago!
Eclipses just show that the Sun is further away, but say nothing about how much further. But you can (and Aristarchus did) get more information from the Moon’s half-full phase. If you can tell when the Moon is exactly half-full, at that moment, the Sun, Earth, and Moon form a right triangle, with right angle at the Moon. If you then measure the angle between the Sun and the Moon in the sky, you can (in principle) determine the ratio of the Sun-Moon distance to the Earth-Moon distance, and hence get the ratio of the Sun’s size to the Moon’s. This is actually a highly error-prone method, since you end up taking the tangent of an angle very close to 90 degrees, but Aristarchus was able to measure precisely enough to correctly say that the Sun is more than 20 times the size of the Moon (much more, of course, be he didn’t know that). Given his previous work on the distace from the Earth to the Moon, he correctly derived that the Sun was larger than the Earth.
So because Newton didn’t know about Quantum Mechanics in the 17th century that makes him wrong? I’m going to need more than ignorance of something unmeasureable in his day to agree with you on that one. But I do agree with the part about not knowing all of the initial conditions.
True, his alchemy fixation was a low point for him, but that doesn’t take away his contributions to the fields of astronomy, economics and calculus.
Yes, in the same sense that the Greeks were “wrong” in that they didn’t know that F=ma.
The point was that “wrong” is a matter of degree, not a binary situation. We never know anything exactly and fully, but science is about getting a better and better approximation of what is actually happening. Newton got the answers “right” to a very high level of accuracy for macro objects, but he got the underlying theory “wrong” because he didn’t know about QM. But QM is probably going to be displaced some day by something that explains things better, too.