Science and Technology in World History, Vol. 1: The Ancient World and Classical Civilization

277 Pages·2010·11.31 MB·English

by  David Deming

Science and Technology
in World History
Volume 1
This page intentionally left blank
Science and Technology
in World History
Volume 1: The Ancient World
and Classical Civilization
D D
AVID EMING
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
The history of science is the history of mankind’s unity,
of its sublime purpose, of its gradual redemption.
—George Sarton (1884–1956)
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Deming, David, ¡954–
Science and technology in world history / David Deming.
v. cm.
v. ¡.The ancient world and classical civilization — v. 2. Early
Christianity, the rise of Islam and the Middle Ages.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-3932-4(v. 1: softcover : 50# alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-7864-5839-4(v. 2 : softcover : 50# alk. paper)
¡. Science—History. 2. Technology—History. 3. World history. I. Title
Q¡25.D334 20¡0 509—dc22 20¡0008935
British Library cataloguing data are available
©20¡0 David Deming. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Friedrich Heinrich Füger, Prometheus Bringing Fire to
Mankind, oil on canvas ¡61⁄3" (cid:215)2¡1⁄2",¡8¡7 (Museumslandschaft Hessen
Kassel/Bridgeman Art Library); (background) Plate¡of the Harmonia
Macrocosmica, Andreas Cellarius,¡66¡
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Introduction 7
Science, Religion and Epistemology 7
Before the Greeks 9
1. The Greeks (c. 600–300 B.C.) 15
Intellectual Freedom, Naturalism, and Demonstration 16
The Ionians (c. 600–400 B.C.) 18
Pythagoras (c. 569–475 B.C.) 29
Parmenides (c. 520–450 B.C.) and the Eleatics 35
Empedocles (c. 492–432 B.C.) 37
Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460–370 B.C.) 40
The Greco–Persian Wars (c. 499–448 B.C.) 48
Socrates (470–399 B.C.) 62
Plato (428–348 B.C.) 71
Philip (382–336 B.C.) and Alexander (356–323 B.C.) 86
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) 101
2. Hellenistic Science (c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 200) 122
The Ptolemaic Kings 122
Euclid (c. 325–265 B.C.) 127
Strato of Lampsacus (c. 340–270 B.C.) 128
Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 B.C.) 131
Eratosthenes (276–195 B.C.) 133
Archimedes (287–212 B.C.) and the Punic Wars (264–146 B.C.) 136
Hipparchus (c. 190–120 B.C.) 158
Claudius Ptolemy (c. A.D. 100–170) 160
3. Roman Engineering 170
Lack of Originality in Science and Philosophy 170
Concrete and the Arch 171
Roads 172
Aqueducts 174
Baths 174
Sewers 175
Bridges 175
v
vi Table of Contents
4. The Roman Writers 178
Vitruvius Pollio: On Architecture (c. 30 B.C.) 178
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65) and Nero (A.D. 37–68) 181
Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79) 191
Galen (c. A.D. 129–200) 195
5. Hellenistic Philosophy in Rome 204
Epicureanism (c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 300) 204
Stoicism (c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 200) 209
Neoplatonism (c. A.D. 250–550) 215
Conclusion 219
Chapter Notes 221
Bibliography 255
Index 263
Preface
The purpose of the present work is in part to define science by revealing through his-
torical facts and analysis the origin of its methods. It was written primarily for those who
want a better understanding of the advance of science and its relation to historical events,
from the practicing scientist, to students, to the lay reader.
Most professional scientists today have been trained as narrowly focused technical
specialists. They know many pertinent and specialized facts, but may lack an understand-
ing of science as method. Consequently, their knowledge is not truly scientific, but as Aris-
totle put it, “merely accidental.”1
Philosophy, history, and religion are foreign fields to many modern scientists, even
with respect to something as crucial as recognizing common intellectual fallacies. The abil-
ity to practice science is necessarily hindered. And the ideal of a disinterested pursuit of
truth has too often been lost as science has been professionalized and facts have been
enrolled in the service of ideological causes. In the past, amateurs sometimes made impor-
tant discoveries and contributions, being motivated by a sincere love of science.
Deficiencies originate in the way scientists are educated. In modern American univer-
sities the sciences are taught as bodies of accumulated fact. Method is not taught; history
is mentioned only as a curiosity. Science has been surgically excised from its historical and
philosophical underpinnings. As a result, students obtain the false idea that science is not
only cumulative and progressive, but linear and inerrant. Blind to the mistakes of the past,
modern scientists can only repeat them.
Understanding science must be accomplished through historical analysis because his-
tory deals with facts. Certainly, there are difficulties. Sources are biased. When Herodotus
recorded that the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) had 192 casualties, while the
Persians had 6,400, we understand that he wrote to glorify Greece, and that accordingly the
body counts may have been exaggerated.2 But there is no historian who doubts that the
battle occurred, or that the Greeks won.
Artifacts are sparse and their interpretation can be contentious. Preservation can be
selective and unrepresentative. Pottery survives, wood does not. Most history is unwrit-
ten, and our histories tend to be based largely upon written sources. The history of the
practical arts and crafts is very important, but there is little written documentation of their
development. Technological knowledge was mostly passed down by oral transmission,
apprenticeship, and firsthand experience. The history of technology may be more impor-
tant than the history of philosophy, but the history of philosophy is easier to reconstruct
because philosophical knowledge was transmitted largely through books.
All sources are inadequate. Because only the exceptional tends to be recorded, it is easy
to obtain the false idea that the extraordinary is the ordinary. All of these problems make
1
2 Preface
it difficult to recover the past. But if we do not make the attempt, we will never learn from
the immense amount of material that is available.
My approach has been chronological and conservative. I have diverged from a uni-
form chronological perspective when it made sense to do so, but the subject is best
approached chronologically because science is a progressive and cumulative activity. Every-
one read everyone else. The Greek physician Galen (c. A.D. 129–200) is an example. After
Aristotle, Galen was the writer most commonly cited by Europeans during the High Mid-
dle Ages. It was from Galen, in part, that people such as Roger Bacon acquired an appre-
ciation for the importance of empiricism. But Galen himself read voluminously and was
apparently strongly influenced by writers such as Hippocrates (c. 460–370 B.C.), Aristotle
(384–322 B.C.), Herophilus (4th century B.C.), and Erasistratus (3rd, 4th century B.C.). The
methodology of modern science did not spring into being spontaneously, it developed
painfully and gradually through an historical process.
Histories of science ought to be conservative. By “conservative,” I mean not a politi-
cal philosophy, but a treatment that shrinks from revisionism and novelty. By novelty, I
mean a radical new interpretation that differs from those reached by all previous workers
for hundreds of years. The inventor of the novelty believes that he alone has discovered a
profound truth which heretofore was obscured by ignorance and prejudice, and that all
previous writers have been wrong in their interpretations and conclusions. This is usually
not the case, and novelties tend to pander to the human weakness to be attracted to the
sensational. History is often rewritten and reinterpreted to meet current social or politi-
cal fashions. Such treatments enjoy a short-lived popularity, but quickly become dated and
have no lasting value. In their lifetime, the scalawag and fraud often receives more recog-
nition than the honest and patient scholar.
Of course, if new data become available, that is another story. For example, our under-
standing of human evolution tends to be significantly revised every time an important fos-
sil is found. This is because the complete database is very small. Interpretations must follow
the data. This is quite different from constructing a radical new interpretation of a static
body of accumulated evidence that others have systematically studied for more than a cen-
tury.
The term “whig history” was introduced by Herbert Butterfield in his book, The Whig
Interpretation of History(1931).3The Whigs and Tories were the two dominant political par-
ties in England from about the late seventeenth through the nineteenth century. The Whigs
were “regarded as the party of the great landowners, and of the merchants and tradesmen.”4
According to Butterfield, the whig historian did not try “to understand the past for the sake
of the past,” but studied “the past for the sake of the present.”5 The whig historian selec-
tively filtered the chronicle of historical events, including those that demonstrate “through-
out the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress, of which the Protestants and
whigs have been the perennial allies while Catholics and Tories have perpetually formed
obstruction.”6
The sin of a whig history is that the bias is implicit, not explicit. The picture of his-
tory that emerges has been predetermined before the chronicle emerges. History is prosti-
tuted to promote a political or cultural point of view. Whig histories have subsequently
become anathema to professional historians.7
Butterfield asserted that it was a “fact that we can never assert that history has proved
Preface 3
any man right in the long run.”8As moral, social, political, and cultural values are relative,
this statement is meaningful when dealing with most aspects of human history. The corol-
lary is that all notions of progress must be chimerical.
But science is different. Should we accept Butterfield’s absolute relativity in the field
of science, we should have to accept that those men who thought the Earth was flat were
just as correct as those who believed it to be spherical. The geocentric model of the solar
system would have to be considered to be just as valid as the heliocentric. Newtonian physics
would be no more “right” than Aristotelian. And we should have to accept that the germ
theory of disease was no more valid than the Hippocratic theory that epidemics arose from
tainted air. No one sincerely holds such views.
According to its own epistemological criteria of observation and reason, scientific
knowledge is undeniably progressive.9 It is “right” in modern times to believe that the
Earth is spherical, “wrong” to think it flat. It is wrong to assert that the Sun moves around
the Earth and not vice versa. Science constructs probable truths according to its own meth-
ods and criteria. Some scientific truths (e.g., the spherical nature of the Earth) have been
strongly corroborated over time to the point of having universal acceptance. Scientific truths
are not absolute like the deductive proofs of geometry, but they have become increasingly
more reliable over history when judged by science’s own methods of observation and rea-
son.
It thus becomes valid, feasible, and interesting to trace the origin of scientific meth-
ods. Once it is accepted that it is possible to differentiate between true and false scientific
knowledge, it also becomes possible to make judgments concerning effective and ineffec-
tive methods. For example, there are few who would now argue that divination and augury
are as likely to lead to reliable knowledge as controlled and systematic experimentation.
This justifies a selective search through the past for those developments and individuals
that made the most significant contributions to modern science.
Ancient science should be described in terms of how it was conducted and understood
by the people who did it. But if we want to understand the origins of modern science, we
must necessarily focus on those activities and individuals that made the most significant
contributions to it. There is only so much space that can be devoted to a discussion of
blind alleys and errors. It is impossible to write a comprehensive history of human error,
because “error is, of its very nature, infinite.”10Anyone desiring a taste of average human
behavior and aspirations is advised to close this book and open the pages of a current news-
paper. All of history is a testament to the fact that “human wisdom is limited; human folly
unlimited.”11The failure to be selective is not a virtue, but an implicit confession of igno-
rance.
The assertion that scientific knowledge can be divided into “true” and “false” must be
qualified. Science ultimately depends upon the methods of reason and experience. It is a
well-known philosophic impossibility to establish absolute truth. Any statement with a pre-
tension to truth must be tested against some criterion of truth. This criterion of truth must
in turn be tested against some other criterion of truth, ad infinitum. Even geometry rests
upon unprovable axioms. The only thing that may be demanded of any system of knowl-
edge is internal consistency: it must satisfy its own criteria of truth.
Because observation is flawed and human reason unreliable, it must be conceded
that scientific knowledge is always provisional and tentative. Some serious thinkers have
entirely rejected the epistemological methods of science. The Islamic mystic and philoso-
pher al–Ghazzali (A.D. 1058–1111) denied the existence of both natural law and cause and