Science in Antiquity: Part 9

 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 582-ca 507 BC/BCE: Pythagoras of Samos stresses the mathematical nature of reality. He declares that “All is number.” Along with metaphysical and religious concepts, Pythagoras teaches other subjects including music, mathematics, vibrating lyre strings, and geometry.

25 May 585 BC/BCE: A solar eclipse ends a war between Lydia and the Medes during the Battle of the Eclipse. The battle stopped because of “day turning into night” and a treaty was signed. The eclipse had been accurately predicted by Thales (Ca 640-546 BC.BCE, WBD), a Greek philosopher. He is considered to have been the father of modern astronomy and geometry.

            The end of fighting resulted in a treaty of alliance cemented by the political marriage of a Lydian princess, Aryenis, to a Median prince, Astyages. 

624-546 BC/BCE:  Thales says the Earth’s surface is curved.

635 BC/BCE: Chinese astronomers notice that a comet’s tail always points away from the sun.

780 BC: The first historical mention of a solar eclipse is made in China.