1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

6.9 Where Do the Clichés about “Ancient Science” Come From? 175
testimony of a writer who, three centuries after the scientist’s death, gratuitously
ascribes to him his own Platonist tendencies.
It was actually authors like Plutarch (who, being Greek in origin, had
a brilliant carrer in the service of the Romans) that created the myth of a
homogeneous “Greco-Roman” civilization, by writing works such as the
Parallel lives. It is this extraordinarily persistent myth that has led so many
people to believe that Archimedes’ feelings on technology can be gleaned
from imperial-age works. 86
Stobaeus tells us that so-and-so started to study geometry with Euclid,
and after having learned the first theorem he asked the master: “But what
will I get out of it once I’ve learned all of this?” Euclid called his slave
and told him, “Give him three obols, the man must profit from what he’s page 223
learning.” 87 Some historians of science have deduced from this anecdote
that Euclid did not care for concrete applications of mathematics. 88
In fact, the very breadth of the applications that were starting to be derived
from mathematics in Euclid’s time made imperative a division of
labor, in which the mathematician had a certain role in which he took
pride and which was very different from the role of, say, the engineer,
who applied mathematical procedures invented by others. While allowing
the resolution of concrete problems with newly found efficacy, the rise
of scientific theories, which is to say theoretical models of parts of the
concrete world, led to the equally new circumstance of certain persons
working within the theory itself. In other words, the birth of science was
closely connected with the appearance of scientists. In the eyes of writers
such as Stobaeus, who belonged to the subsequent (prescientific) society
to whom we owe the record of this new class of professionals, its members,
immersed as they were in theoretical work, seemed uninterested in
the practical aspects of life.
Moreover it was precisely the division of labor between scientists and
technicians that demanded extreme rigor from those who worked on the
theory, and so gave impulse to the new scientific method. Indeed, if the
person who obtains a mathematical result also knows its only possible application,
it doesn’t matter if the result is exact: a reasonable approximation
is enough, as was generally the case in the mathematics of Pharaonic
Egypt or Old Babylonia, which did not distinguish, for example, between
86 Pappus attributes to Carpus of Antioch an assertion similar to Plutarch’s, saying that Archimedes
wrote nothing on applied subjects because he deemed them unworthy (Pappus, Collectio,
VIII, 1026, 9–12, ed. Hultsch). We must conclude that today’s scientists also consider applications
of economic and military interest unworthy of being divulged, based on the scarceness of books
on the subject.
87 Stobaeus, Eclogae, II, 228, 25–29 (ed. Wachsmuth).
88 See, for example, [Boyer], p. 111 (1st ed.), p. 101 (2nd ed.).
Revision: 1.7 Date: 2002/09/14 23:17:37