Science in Antiquity: Part 8

 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.

 

fl 450-370 BC/BCE: The Greek philosopher Leucippus teaches that all matter is composed of identical eternally existing, constantly moving particles surrounded by nothingness between the particles.  His student, Democritus, further developed the atomic theory.  Democritus taught that everything is material and is created by combinations of eternally existing atoms.

Ca 475 BC/BCE: Death of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher whose ideas correctly predict one of the main concepts of the modern understanding of the nature of matter. He teaches that solid matter is really made of fire (read this in the modern way as subatomic particles) which is in constant motion.

Ca 490-ca 420 BC/BCE: The Greek philosopher, Protagoras, declares that there is no objective truth and that we all have our own reality.

Ca 500 BC: 1. Cataract surgery is performed in India by Susrata, a surgeon. The use of anesthesia is not mentioned until the 1^st Century AD/CE.

              2. Iron tools appear in China.

              3. Chinese weapon makers invent the crossbow.

               4. In Babylon, mathematical calculations are used to predict the movements and positions of astral bodies.

              5. A Greek physician, Alcmaeon, discovers the Eustachian tubes.

16 July 523 BC/BCE: Ptolemy correctly predicts a lunar eclipse.