beginnings and greek miracle

8/3/2019 Beginnings and Greek Miracle

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CHAPTER

ONE

BEGINNINGS


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WORK AND ENERGY

When and where what we now call science started,nobody knows. But we do know that it slowly grewfrom humans awe at the heavens and from the arts

of healing, hunting, construction, and war. Seeds of

it appeared during the Stone Age, in the inventionof such hunting implements as the bow and arrow.While the early hunters surely did not try tounderstand the flight of the arrow, the arrows

effectiveness depended on the predictability of itsflight, which was taken for granted.


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Anyone able to predict these unsettling phenomena wasregarded as possessing extraordinary powers. Though itcould be found in other places as well, an intense interest

in the movements of the heavenly bodies is definitelyknown to have existed quite early in Egypt, as thedevelopment of its stellar-based calendar clearly shows;this calendar can be traced back as far as 4236 bce.(Note the precision, probably the earliest known date inhistory.) The construction of a calendar, of course, is thesurest sign of faith in the regularity of daily life.


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MEASUREMENT

Along with such proto-scientific learning, Egyptiantechnology became increasingly sophisticated aswell.

The measurements of blocks used for the pyramids

constructed during the thirtieth century BCE areremarkably precise; for example, the leveling of a50-foot beam was done correctly with an error ofonly 0.02 inches.

The accuracyof three granite sarcophagi ofSenusert II, Twelfth Dynasty (20001788),averages 0.004 inches from a straight line in someparts, 0.007 inches in others, according to thescience historian George Sarton.


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TIME

The Mesopotamian civilizations directed their quasi-scientific attention primarily toward astronomy andcommerce. Sumerian astronomers began byconstructing a lunar calendar, which they later

modified, assuming the year consisted of 360 daysand dividing the day into 12 equal hours, the legacyof which echoed through the ages. But the greatestastronomical achievements of the later Babylonians

were many extremely detailed lunar and stellarobservations, and in particular an accuratetabulation of the rising and setting of the planetVenus.


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ROTATION

As we now know, the motion is caused by aprecession of the axisof rotation of the Earth, sothat the inclination of this axis with respect to theecliptic wobbles with a period of about 26,000

years. Historians therefore have good reason toregard the Babylonians as the founders of an earlyform of scientific astronomy. Two hundred yearslater, the precession of the equinoxes was clearly

discovered by the great Greek astronomerHipparchus, albeit relying not only on his ownobservations but also on early Babylonian star data,without which he could not have made thediscovery.


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GEOMETRY

In geometry, the Babylonians knew the areas ofright and isosceles triangles, as well as the volumesof a rectangular parallelepiped (a solid with sixfaces, each a parallelogram), of a right circular

cylinder, and of the frustum of a square pyramid.There is also convincing evidence that they hadsome knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem, butin circular measurements they were behind the

contemporary Egyptians: the Egyptian value of 3.16for was closer to its correct value of approximately3.14 than the Babylonian value of 3.


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THE GREEKMIRACLE


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THE GREEK MIRACLEMany of the proto-scientific

ideas of the early Greeks hadtheir roots in the Egyptian andBabylonian traditions they

inherited.


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That are art of astronomicalobservation and a knowledge ofspecific regularities such as the

18-year cycle, called the saros,which brought the moon and the

sun in the same relative position,enabling the more or less reliableprediction of eclipses


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Real science was just one component ofa sudden emergence of high culture,

beginning in the sixth century bce, that

is sometimes hailed as the Greekmiracle.


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There was some great scientist lived in thisage.

Some of them are:

* Thales of miletos

* Anaximander of Miletos

* Pythagoras* Empedocles

* Democritus of Abdera

* Aristotle* Archimedes


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There are a lot of scientist expand

on that age. But if we concerns tophysics develop then we get if

physics growth steadily on thisage.

Some of them are :


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1. Several different models of thesolar system and the cosmoswere put forward, but the one

closest to the modern view, theheliocentric model of Aristarchus,was generally ignored in favor of a

complicated geocentricconstruction by Ptolemy.


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2. the overarching conviction carried byscientifically knowledgeablephilosophers was that nature was

orderly, subject to regular rules, anddeterministic.

This was perhaps the most

significant scientific legacy of classicalGreece.


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3. Discovered of hydrostatis byarchimedes. the weight of a

body wholly or partiallyimmersed in a fluid is reducedby an amount equal to the

weight of the fluid that thebody displaces.

beginnings and greek miracle

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