Science in Antiquity: Part 7

 

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.

 

387-312 BC/BCE: Life of the astronomer, Heraclides of Pontus. Among his statements; Venus and Mercury revolve around the sun; the Earth rotates on its axis once per day.

388 BC/BCE: Plato teaches that the sun, moon, and the planets move in perfect circlers around the Earth.

408 -355 BC/BCE: Eudoxus, a Greek astronomer and mathematician, explains the movements of the planets and calculates that the solar year is six hours longer than the stated 365 days.

426 BC/BCE: Thucydides correctly explains the cause of tsunamis.

428 BC/BCE: Death of Anaxogoras, a Greek philosopher whose students included Socrates, Pericles, and Euripides. He taught that matter is composed of tiny particles and that the heavenly bodies are large stones thrown from the Earth.