Karina+Week+2

__Early Greek Science__ by Michael Fowler

First off, this article was very interesting to me because of its relevence to my current studies in chemistry and calculus. I will discuss this in more detail in the conclusion however.

This article begins with the first recorded contribution to Greek science by the Milesians, of whom Thales was marked. His ideas that the world and natural phenomana could be explained without explainations such as "arbitrary acts by gods..." were in direct contrast with the commom Greek beliefs at the time, where weather and other natural events were due to Zeus or Poseidon or any other of the gods of the Greek pantheon. The world was now open to new laws that could take the place of supernatural beliefs.

The two particular types of theories that were developed by the Milesians and are as follows: Ones about particular phenomena, and ones that questioned the nature of life and the universe, especially the fundamental question about the origin of life, with different propositions suggested about what the universe started as - water, air, or chaos. This seems like a primitive arguement that we see in the modern day, with different groups presenting their ideas about the specific origins of the universe in contrast to the theological explainations.

The next sections of the article talks about Greek math, specifically geometry (Euclid's //Elements// anyone?) and touches on the special theorem that we all use in geometry, the Pythagorean Theroem. Coincidentally, the Pythagoreans were the ones to develop that theory (well Pythagorus to be precise) and apparently the ones who coined the term "square" number. Though I actually find it intersting that Fowler adds, "Actually it seems very probably that this result [a "squared" + b "squared" = c "squared"] was known to the Babylonians a thousand years earlier...and to the Egyptians, who, for example, used lenghts of rope 3, 4 and 5 units long to set up a large right-angle for building and surveying purposes." It is very interesting to me as well to think about the ways in which these people were able to discover these ideas about the world with such limited material compared to today. I mean, anyone can punch in a number into a calculator without understanding why they do so, but what if they are asked to write the program before? And it was not just one group of people doing these discoveries, but, as Fowler points out in the above quote, people a thousand years before the Greeks might have been doing the same math.

As I mentioned at the beginning, some of this article ties into my calculus and my chemisty class. Pointedly, the irrationality of the square root of 2. The fact that this number is irrational and thus would not fit into the Pythagorean's "perfect numbers" is something that was discussed in my math class when we were asked to define the square root of 2. Then our teacher asked us how we knew that the square root of 2 existed if we could not define it as a fraction or decimal. The only was to "prove" that the square root of 2 exists is to take the limit as x aproaches from both the left and the right. We can then get infinetely close to the value, but we can never get the exact value, so we give it one.

Fowler then discusses the Greek's idea of a world with 4 elements - earth, air, fire and water - that were combined in special quantities to form all matter. This is the other part of the article that relates to my classes (in this case chemistry). Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera "...claimed that the physical world consisted of atoms in constant motion..." Atoms! This sounds a lot like Dalton's Atomic Theory of which the first part is that all matter is composed of atoms.

As this summary and discussion gets excessively long, I will only touch on the new systematic observations in diagnosing disease. Hippocrates then, is called "the first doctor" because he believed that there was a rational explaination for epilepsy instead of being caused by the gods. This would lead to careful observations by doctors in diagnosing and treating illnesses that used to be ineffectively prayed over.

In conclusion, the Greeks were intrumental in discovering much of the underlying ideas of out mathematics and the basics of chemistry that are still applicable today, which is quite an accomplishment after 1000 plus years of scruintenty.