1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

6.7 Hellenistic Science and Experimental Method 171
pulse (page 125) and the use of a balance in Erasistratus’ physiological
experiment (page 134).
If by experimental method we understand the practice of observation
under artificially created conditions, the most significant examples are
perhaps in pneumatics, where we see the systematic construction of experimental
gadgets for demonstrations, but examples are documented in
other areas as well. 77
Von Staden, examining five physiological experiments performed in the
third century B.C., finds in one or more of them each of the features regarded
by modern philosophers of science as characteristic of the experimental
method. Shunning generalizations about “ancient science”, he underscores
the sudden emergence of the experimental method in the third
century and its equally rapid decline in the second. 77a
Among those who continue to deny the existence of the experimental
method in Antiquity there are some who recognize the existence of welldocumented
ancient experiments but claim they were sporadic events that
did not add up to a method. 78 But making true experiments in the absence
of an experimental method would be a bit like casually writing a few sentences
before writing was invented. The notion of an experiment implies
a qualitative methodological leap that cannot occur at random.
Because no one doubts that the “experimental method” was fully operational
in eighteenth-century European physics — that it was in fact an
essential feature of it — the question of what is meant by the expression
can be illuminated by a study of the paraphernalia in use at the time.
Consider, for example, a 1794 inventory of the contents of the “physical
theater” of the University of Rome (then called “Archigimnasio”). 78a
It comprises (besides modern devices such as electrostatic machines and
microscopes) objects such as a pneumatic pump, glassware for pneumatic
experiments, devices for experiments on the “elasticity of air”, hydrostatic
balances, inclined planes, barycenter finders, levers, beam balances,
pulleys, winches, screws, Archimedean screws and a Heronian fountain.
Thus, experimental physics developed in part thanks to the reintroduction
of devices whose Hellenistic origin is clear even from their names. Only
after the recovery was consolidated did it become possible to believe that
there was no experimental method in Antiquity.
77
For pneumatics, see page 69. For an example of an experimental device in optics, see note 20
on page 240.
77a
[von Staden: EEHM].
78
Thus M. D. Grmek on Erasistratus’ physiology experiment; see [Grmek], Chap. V, for example.
78a
Inventario delle machine esistenti nel Teatro Fisico dell’Archigimnasio Della Sapienza. Adì 26 dicembre
1794. Preserved in the museum of the Physics Department of the University of Rome La Sapienza.
A summary can be found at http://www.phys.uniroma1.it/DOCS/MUSEO/catalogo1794.html.
Revision: 1.7 Date: 2002/09/14 23:17:37