1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

178 6. The Hellenistic Scientific Method
The remaining cliché, that the Greeks developed mathematics but were
incapable of creating physics, is closely connected to the one just discussed.
Even Sambursky, one of a handful of authors who have taken an interest
in the physics of the Greeks, believed that they had in fact no real
physics. 94 I fear that his belief, like other clichés we have been discussing,
was fostered in part by terminological naïveté. Many historians of science,
taking as eternal the current boundaries between subjects, have felt
that they could reach conclusions about the existence of Greek physics by
concentrating on the writings of those whom the Greeks themselves labeled
“physicists”, ignoring what was called “mathematics”. As a result,
they basically looked at ancient natural philosophy (which lacked, among
other things, the experimental method), and failed to notice the birth of the
first quantitatively and experimentally based scientific theories about nature.
How else to explain Sambursky’s decision to base his analysis on the
writings of various pre-Socratic philosophers, of Plato and Aristotle, and
to devote a whole book to the “physics” of the Stoics, while showing very
little interest in scientists such as Euclid, Ctesibius, Philo, Archimedes and
Hipparchus?
Of course, the idea that Hellenistic theories such as hydrostatics and
geometric optics, which today belong in physics textbooks, were at the
time pure mathematics is due not only to the semantic shift undergone
by the name “mathematics”, but to the hypothetico-deductive nature of
the expository texts that have come down to us. Yet note that in the modern
age it was only after a few centuries of scientific development that
a similar structure was constructed for mechanics, thermodynamics and
classical electromagnetism.
94 See [Sambursky: PWG] and [Sambursky: PS]. For example, Chapter 10 of the former book
argues that the Greeks lacked altogether the ability to make experiments.
Revision: 1.7 Date: 2002/09/14 23:17:37