Eureka! (Icon Science): The Birth of Science

By Andrew Gregory

Medicine, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and cosmology, science began with the Greeks, and Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates were amongst its stars. That man ever managed to develop a 'scientific' attitude to the natural world at all is one of the true wonders of human thought.
Eureka! shows how, free from intellectual and religious dogma, these early thinkers rejected myths and capricious gods and, in distinguishing between the natural and supernatural, effectively discovered nature.

Andrew Gregory, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London, unravels the genesis of science in this fascinating exploration of the origins of Western civilisation, and our desire for a rational, legitimating system of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785781926

Book preview

1 The Early Greeks and their Predecessors

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

Sir Karl Popper, ‘The Philosophy of Science’, in C.A. Mace (ed.), British Philosophy in the Mid-Century (1957)

When and where science began depends to some extent on what we think science is. Science is a more sophisticated activity than technology. With technology, one knows how to do something, or when something will occur. With science, one has a theory and an explanation of why such a thing should happen. A good example is the production of iron tools. One can mine iron ore and go through the processes of refining and forging iron without having any idea of the nature of those processes or why they work. If so, one has only technology. Or one might have a theory which allows one to explain each step of the process, and so understand what is going on. One might then be said to have science. Many ancient societies clearly had technology. Indeed, we define certain historical ages by the sort of technology that was possessed. So we have the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age etc., characterised by the technology for producing stone, bronze and iron tools. All societies have had some form of technology. We might even say that some animals have a rudimentary technology, since they use tools (e.g., birds using stones to break open snail shells). We would not say, though, that they have science. Science is a step beyond technology, requiring at least the attempt to explain and understand.

How much of a step beyond is another matter. The more one builds into a definition of science, the later one is likely to believe that it begins. As a basic minimum, though, we are looking for the following:

Science deals with the natural world, so we are looking for an awareness of a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and a desire to explain using only natural factors and not, for example, the intervention of the gods.

Science is expressed in terms of theories, so we are looking for theories about the world, as opposed to the myths or poems typical of some ancient societies.

Science is also characterised by the use of mathematics, experiment and observation. We are looking for science as opposed to mere technology.

It would also be helpful if our candidates as the originators of science were aware of the differences between what they were doing and what their predecessors were doing.

All of this, and rather more, we find with the ancient Greeks but not with any previous society. We are not, of course, looking for something that is identical with modern science. Science progresses, and we can hardly expect the content of ancient theories to stand comparison with modern theories. What we are looking for is something which has enough in common with modern science, in terms of orientation of investigation and the types of explanation offered, to be recognisable as its ancestor.

Science Must Begin with Myths

It is impossible to doubt the technological and mathematical achievements of some societies prior to the Greeks. The Babylonians had in place a sophisticated number system and means of solving equations. A great number of clay tablets have been found in tombs in what was Mesopotamia and is now Iraq (between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), giving us a considerable insight into the achievements of the Babylonians. They managed to construct a workable calendar, by no means a trivial feat when starting from scratch. The relation between days, lunar months and solar years is a very complex one. There is not a whole number of days in a lunar month or solar year, nor a whole number of lunar months in a solar year. The Babylonians were also very good observers of the heavens. Some of their clay tablets turned out to be detailed and accurate observations of the movements of the heavens, with astronomical predictions worked out mathematically. The best candidate for science prior to the ancient Greeks is undoubtedly Babylonian astronomy.

While the Babylonians were very good at observation and prediction, they never got beyond describing the heavens in terms of myths and poems. They had no theories as to the nature of the heavens, and they failed to produce any explanations of the phenomena. Their predictions worked by extrapolation from the data, rather than from a model of the heavens. For example, if an eclipse has happened in year 1, year 3, year 5 and year 7, then we might predict that an eclipse will also happen in year 9. One can make this prediction without saying anything at all about the nature of the heavens or the nature of eclipses. In fairness to the Babylonians, the mathematics they used was much more sophisticated than this, as were their predictions. But there was nothing which explained what an eclipse was, or why it should happen at a particular time. The Babylonians were concerned only with when, not why – they had a technology of astronomical prediction, but not the science of astronomy. They also had a purely mythical cosmogony (theory of the creation of the universe).

Here is a passage from the Enuma Elisha, the Babylonian creation epic, probably composed early in the second millennium BC:

When the upper heavens had as yet no name,

And the lower heavens had not as yet been named,

When only the primeval Apsu which was to beget them yet existed,

And their mother Ti’amat, who gave birth to them all: When all was as yet mixed in the waters,

And no dry land could be seen – not even a marsh;

When none of the Gods had yet been brought into existence,

Or been given names, or had their destinies fixed:

Then were the Gods created between the begetters.

S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Fabric of the Heavens (1961), p. 42.

With the Greeks came a new sort of society with some radically different attitudes to the world and how to explain it.

Two Cultures

Greek society was affluent enough for some relatively well-to-do people to have sufficient time to consider philosophical questions, including the nature of the world around them. They also had the intellectual freedom to pursue original lines of thought. Significantly, the Greeks had no centralised religion and no official caste of priests. Babylonian society was hierarchical, both in the literal sense that it was ruled by priests (from the Greek hieros, priest, arche, rule) and in the sense that it was rigidly stratified. In Greek society there was tolerance of a wide range of religious views, and of debate in general. An excellent example of this can be found in the views of Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. 520 BC),¹ a philosopher and theologian. Xenophanes lived to be at least 92, wrote in verse and travelled extensively. He was particularly critical of popular religion, and of the gods in the epic tales of Homer and Hesiod. He said that:

Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all those things which are shameful and reproachful among men: theft, adultery and deceiving each other … Mortals believe that the gods are born, and that they have clothes, speech and bodies similar to their own … If cattle, horses and lions had hands, and could draw with those hands and accomplish the works of men, horses would draw the forms of gods as like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would make their bodies as each had themselves … The Ethiopians claim their gods are snub-nosed and black, while the Thracians claim theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Here I should explain that in the case of some Greek thinkers, notably Plato and Aristotle, we are fortunate enough to have had virtually all of their works preserved intact. With others, particularly the early Greeks, we have very little of their work preserved directly, and we have to use what are known as fragments – quotations from them, or descriptions of their views preserved in the work of later writers. The fragments of Xenophanes are very important. Firstly, Xenophanes was critical of popular religion, without being persecuted for his views. Secondly, his ideas illustrate some important features of the early Greeks. Critical of orthodox opinions, they had a self-awareness that allowed them to see a great deal of traditional religion as anthropomorphic. We see here also the cosmopolitan nature of the Greeks. As a trading and seafaring nation, they were aware of the views of other cultures, and able to take them into account.

Cosmos: an Elegant Universe

The ancient Greek word cosmeo has given us several words in modern English, such as ‘cosmology’ (the study of the universe), ‘cosmogony’ (the study of the origins of the cosmos) and ‘cosmetic’. The last may seem somewhat surprising, but cosmeo not only meant to order or arrange, but also had a sense of good order; and also of beautiful, aesthetically pleasing order. A statement which is deceptively simple, but is in fact of enormous importance for the origins of science, is that the Greeks believed themselves to live in a cosmos, a well-ordered place. To them, the universe had an order, and a good and pleasing order at that. What is more, the Greeks were the first to recognise a distinction between the natural and the supernatural. They considered the cosmos to be an entirely natural place. Things did not happen at random, or by the caprice of the gods. With an optimism that was typical of them, the early Greeks believed the cosmos to be comprehensible. The order of the cosmos was something that could be discovered and understood by humans. Furthermore, they believed that the cosmos could be successfully described in words and numbers.

The first philosophers and scientists were the Milesians: Thales (fl. 585 BC), Anaximander (fl. 555 BC) and Anaximenes (fl. 525 BC). They came from Miletus in Asia Minor (on what is now the Turkish coast), an important cosmopolitan trading centre which had strong links with older Eastern cultures. Thales is said to have predicted an eclipse in 585 BC, to have been a brilliant geometer, and to have allowed a Greek army to cross a river by suggesting that they divert it into two streams, each of which was fordable. Anaximander was a pupil of Thales, and is said to have produced the first map of the known inhabited world. Anaximenes is reputed to have been a pupil of Anaximander. Unfortunately, little else is known about the lives of the Milesians, but they were the first to describe the cosmos in entirely natural terms, and the breadth of their theorising was quite remarkable. They also took the important step of not focusing on individual events (e.g., what caused this earthquake?), but looked instead at classes of events (e.g., what causes earthquakes?). This enabled them to form general theories about the causes of events, rather than specific theories about one event.

The philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500 BC) insisted that the cosmos worked according to a logos, which in Greek could mean ‘word’, ‘account’, ‘measure’ or ‘proportion’. We derive the word-ending ‘-ology’ from logos (as in biology), as well as the word ‘logo’. That the cosmos obeyed a logos meant not only that it was an orderly place, but also that it was comprehensible to humans if they could grasp the nature of this logos. The cosmos could be correctly described and understood using words. To do so, it was necessary for humans to generate a common account of the logos, not just individual accounts, and to follow it wherever it led. Thus,