1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

346 11. The Age-Long Recovery
important results of later science, but in a context that obviously cannot
account for their origin. Not only that: it was necessary to conceal many
of Newton’s own writings, including those where he credits Pythagoras
and the ancient Egyptians with ideas now taken to be sudden creations of
his own genius. 178
The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science
gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric. Still in the nineteenth century,
the scientific and technological superiority of moderns over ancients was
argued with a vehemence that may seem surprising to us today.
After the turnaround that occurred under the Enlightenment, ancient
culture continued to be an essential influence on European science, but
an unconscious one, much as blotted-out experiences continue to affect
someone’s psyche. Many important scientists were also archeologists and
Greek scholars (Joseph Fourier, Thomas Young); a good part of the others,
like the two Darwins and Freud, were cultured in the classics and read the
ancients. But the influence of the study of Greek sources on scientific development
often went unnoticed by the scientists themselves, as we have
seen on several occasions and will see again in the next section. And the
relinquishment of Latin as a language of science started to create a rift
between scientific culture and humanistic studies that in due time would
make perhaps a majority of medieval and early modern writings largely
inaccessible to all but classical scholars.
11.11 Recovery and Crisis of Scientific Methodology
The closer we get to the deepest aspects of Hellenistic science, which are
the methodological ones, the longer they took to reappear.
One important methodological step in the evolution of modern mechanics
was the introduction of variational principles, which correspond to ways
to formulate a dynamical problem not as a search for solutions of ordinary
differential equations with chosen initial conditions (Cauchy problems) page 424
but as a search for minimum points of appropriate functionals. Instead of
deducing the future from the past (a process regarded as causal, if only
unconsciously), the variational formulation in principle allows the whole
motion to be obtained simultaneously.
This “radically new” way of setting problems was derived from its first
attested example, transmitted by Heron of Alexandria and dealing with
optics. 179 It was natural to draw ideas from Hellenistic science in trying to
178 See pages 330–331.
179 Heron, De speculis, 4. See also pages 56–56, including notes 35–37.
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20