Science in Antiquity: Part 5

 Many modern people have a very limited view of history. They can only see or think about five or ten years into the past. They see history as boring and they think of the ancients as ignorant and backward. This was actually not true. What the ancients lacked was the modern accumulation of facts. An ancient Israelite would have been very puzzled and culture-shocked to have been dumped into the modern world, but he or she could have eventually learned to drive a car or to cook on a stove or to use a cellphone.

The ancients were just as intelligent as we are but the accumulation of scientific facts had not yet reached a critical point. Human knowledge took centuries to double, fact by fact. As knowledge accumulated, the rate of accumulation began to speed up. Every answer exposes a new question. Buckminster Fuller spoke of the Knowledge Doubling Curve which was relatively flat for centuries, then began a slow climb, and then went into an explosive upward thrust.

By the end of the 19^th Century, knowledge was doubling once per century. By about 1945, the rate of doubling was about every 25 years. By 1982, the rate was about every 12-13 months. By 2020, the doubling was occurring about every 12 hours. With at least 50,000,000,000 devices now operating and with the rise of artificial intelligence, the rate may now be in minutes.

 

Ca 240 BC: Chinese astronomers record an appearance of Halley’s Comet in Records of the Grand Historian.

262-190 BC/BCE: Apollonius, A Greek mathematician, develops the theory of conic sections.

Ca 280 BC/BCE: Aristachus of Samos calculates the first known estimate of the distance from the sun to the Earth and says that the Earth orbits the sun.

Fl 285-222 BC/BCE: Ctesibus, an Egyptian barber and scientist, studied pneumatics, siphons, air pumps, and the expansion and contraction of air pressure.

Ca 287 BC/BCE, WBD: Birth of Archimedes (Ca 287-212) in Syracuse (modern Siragusa, Italy), Greek mathematician and inventor. He studied levers, plane and solid geometry, mechanics, pulleys, hydraulics, and heat concentration using mirrors and is the first recorded person to have calculated the value of pi.