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 19th 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.
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