Were the ancient Greeks that smart or just lucky to go first?
Whether you’re talking physics (Aristarchus, Democritus, Eratosthenes…), philosophy (Plato, Socrates, Diogenes…), mathematics (Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagorus…), history (Thucydides, Herodotus…), literature (Aeschylus, Euripedes Sophocles…), medicine (Hippocrates), everything (Aristotle), the seminal contributions seem to have been made by the Greeks between about 500 and 300 B.C.
Was this truly an especially concentrated focus of genius (both geographically and temporally) or was it more a reflection that whoever comes first (and is reasonably clever) will be bound to identify the salient points and fundamental issues?
A lot of it just has to do that they were one of the first groups or maybe even the first to develop a productive civilization. Think about how far technology has come in the last 150 to 200 years since the industrial revolution. It also was a product of a productive civilization. The middle ages were consumed with wars and disease but when civilization gets past those kinds of problems and becomes productive then inovation follows. The greeks had a productive civilization therefore they had the system in place for inovation and discovery.
Their physics sucked; I don’t remember who postulated that dropping a rock from the mast of a ship would cause it to land behind it. Why didn’t they test it? Conservation of momentum tells us that it would go through the deck…Maybe they did test it and no one lived to tell the tale.
One of them did calculate the diameter of the earth to about 20%, though. At local noon, when he could see the sun reflected in a very deep well, he signaled someone to measure the angle of the shadow of Cleopatra’s needle and calculated the diameter from that. I don’t know how he signaled, a bunch of guys lined up yelling at each other, mirrors, trumpets or what. The speed of sound and reaction time were probably what caused his error.
What kind of number system did they have? The Roman?
Well, the Greeks certainly didn’t entirely originate these subjects per se, it’s just that the modern Western forms of these subjects are indeed rooted in the classical Greek forms. In mathematics and what you call physics (though I’d say astronomy is closer to the mark), the Greeks weren’t all that original to start with: they took over earlier Babylonian discoveries and adapted their models to a more “geometrized” view. (That’s what I tend to think of as the “original” Greek contribution to exact science, the willingness to reduce the scope of your study to characteristics that can be described by a rigorously consistent geometrical model. Seems kind of bizarrely restrictive at first, but it ended up providing a lot of model-building power. See Otto Neugebauer’s The Exact Sciences in Antiquity* for a lot of detail about where the Babylonians come into it.) As for other fields, sure there existed a lot of what we now characterize as, e.g., literature (the Sumerian/Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh), philosophy (the Indian Vedic literature) and medicine before 500 BCE and outside the Greek world; it’s just that our civilization tends to define these subjects as they were defined by the thinkers that shaped them in our civilization. Basically, what you’ve noticed is that Western culture still thinks largely in Greek intellectual categories, so naturally it looks to us as though the Greeks invented everything.
Anyway, glad to see you here, Karl: bet you’re interested to find out after all these centuries that it looks as though the universe is flat after all, huh?
Oh boy, I’m gonna be kept busy on this thread. (That’s okay, I love it! :)) c-plant said:
You’re probably thinking of a discussion of this thought-experiment in one of Galileo’s Dialogues, but it is indeed based in Aristotle’s notions of motion.
That was Eratosthenes, and no, he didn’t have a human signal relay set up; he used observations in separate cities, Alexandria and Syene.
In this period it was chiefly the non-place-value alphanumeric system (can I get Greek letters with these codes?): α = 1, β = 2,…ι = 10, κ = 20,…etc. For fractions in scientific calculations they used the Babylonian base-60 place-value system (successive negative powers of 60), but represented each fractional place with their own alphanumeric notation. (That’s how come we have the weird mix of decimal and sexagesimal (base-60) notation for things like time and spherical coordinates today: decimal for the integer part and then base 60 for the minutes and seconds.)
Erastothenes’ experiment: He assumed the earth was a sphere. Now the city of Aswan, now in Egypt, is situated on the tropic of Cancer. This means that the sun shines directly down on it (specifically, down a certain well) on the summer solstice. Erastothenes measured the distance between Aswan and Alexandria, then measured the angle of the shadow cast in Alexandria by the sun on the solstice. He then used geometry; this angle was also the angle which subtended the arc on the surface of the earth between Alexandria and Aswan. Since he knew the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, he then knew what fraction of the earth’s circumference this represented, and all he had to do was multiply. His estimate was a lot closer than 20%; IIRC he came within some hundreds of miles. I know this because Patrick Stewart explained it to me in a video we watched for geography class once.
Kimstu hits this nail right on the head. We know about the Greeks because they are westerners, like us. Indian and Chinese scientist, mathematicians, philosophers, and writers were making the same discoveries as the Greeks were, around the same time.
Let’s not forget that during Europe’s Dark Ages, the Arabs kept a lot of the knowledge alive and gave it back to us, plus a couple centuries’ worth of refinements, after we got our collective act together and fired up the Renaissance. The Indians had the basic principles of algebra but it was the Arabs who laid it all out and gave us a more or less complete concept (as well as the word). Plenty of good astronomical knowledge as well. (Gottal love zenith and nadir, too.)
The Arabs most definitely helped to keep the knowledge alive. Much (? most) would have been lost without them. But, the knowledge that they preserved was of Greek origin.
Dunno how much would really have been lost of the Greek originals of scientific texts if it weren’t for Islamic culture; there are some Greek works which were preserved only in Arabic, but a far greater number survived in the Byzantine Greek tradition and diffused into Western Europe, especially after the events in Constantinople in 1453. (That influx of classical learning in the original Greek, without the problems of successive translations via Arabic and/or Hebrew and/or Spanish into Latin, was a large part of what goosed up the Renaissance.)
But as Olentzero pointed out, the Muslims contributed lots of stuff to the Greek tradition: developments in astronomy, math, optics, philosophy, medicine, you name it. (And 2sns, thy dd t ll wtht xplctly wrtng thr vwls, nd t wrkd jst fn! :)) Plus they injected into the mix a good deal of Indian and Sassanid Persian material in notation, computation, philosophical concepts, etc. And let’s not forget (though without falling into all the excesses of the “Black Athena”-Afroasiatic-roots-of-Hellenism crowd) that a number of Greek ideas were rooted in things they learned from other civilizations anyway. So my short answer to the question in the OP would be:
yes, they were definitely very smart and left us many exciting ideas, some of which can be fairly said to be unique to their own cultural tradition;
yes, they were definitely lucky—perhaps not in somehow being the first to stumble upon some huge cache of universal knowledge, but rather in having their particular intellectual legacy survive in Western culture;
but they didn’t exist outside of time or cultural interchange, and many of the things that seem from our “Eurocentric” viewpoint like Greek “seminal discoveries” are closely connected to lots of other intellectual developments that were going on before and around them.
The problem in trying to determine the error in that measurement, is that he reported his result in stadia, and nowadays, nobody’s quite sure how long one stadium was supposed to be. A lot of folks actually determine the length of the stadium by using Erastothenes’ value for the circumferance of the Earth. It is true, though, that he could have potentially gotten very accurate.
By the way, every copy of Euclid’s Elements currently extant was translated via Arabic. I’ve heard (pure speculation) that the Arabs’ knowledge of geometry was one of the reasons that they went twelve and one on the Crusades.
Reasons I’ve heard why the Arabs kept the Holy Land:
-Silk. Arrow hits guy wearing armor, it pierces, getting lodged in skin. Arrow hits guy in silk, it gets tangled in silk, saving flesh.
-Group tactics. The ignorant serfs fought as untrained hordes, but the average knight was also a lord, landed and proud. He wouldn’t fight by the side of anyone, because all glory must be his alone. Plus, the knights had been getting fat off of the sweat of the serfs for a few centuries (at least since Charlemagne’s empire fell), making them unsuited to fight.
-Arabs had home-court advantage. The Europeans had to travel over boat or land to hot deserts most unlike the temperate forests of Europe. Boats spread disease in close quarters, and overland travel meant hiking with full gear for miles at a time.
-Arabs were fighting for home, not plunder. The knights were there to get as much treasure as possible without fighting too hard. The serfs wanted the same thing, really. The Arabs were fighting kaffirs trying to take their homeland and their Holy Land. Who’d fight harder?
Like I said, Derleth, one of the reasons. I have no doubt that those others you mentioned were important, too. You might also want to add that the Muslim leaders were generally better strategists/tacticians.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread, already in progress.
“Observations in two cities”
If he did not compare someone else’s measurements with his, how was he in two places at the same time? Did he take two measurements one year apart on the same day of the year?
Thanks!
