Elena's Legacy. Texts written by Elena, excerpts from texts she liked, her artworks.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Ancient Science

Anixamander said and argued that we are so helpless at birth, that if the first human infants had been put into the world on their own, they would immediately have died. From this Anaximander concluded that human beings arose from other animals with more self-reliant newborns: He proposed the spontaneous origin of life in mud, the first animals being fish covered with spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and moved to dry land, where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of one form into another.

Anixamander believed in an infinite number of worlds, all inhabited, and all subject to cycles of dissolution and regeneration. “Nor”, as Saint Augustine ruefully complained, “did he, any more than Thales, attribute the cause of all this ceaseless activity to a divine mind”.

In the year 540 B.C. or thereabouts, on the island of Samos, there came to power a tyrant named Polycrates. He seems to have started as a caterer and then gone on to international piracy. Polycrates was a generous patron of the arts, sciences and engineering. But he oppressed his own people; he made war on his neighbours; he quite rightly feared invasion. So he surrounded his capital city with a massive wall, about six kilometers long, whose remains stand to this day. To carry water from a distant spring through the fortifications, he ordered a great tunnel built. A kilometer long, it pierces a mountain. Two cuttings were dug from either end which met almost perfectly in the middle. The project took about fifteen years to complete, a testament to the civil engineering of the day and an indication of the extraordinary practical capability of the Ionians. But there is another and more ominous side to the enterprise: it was built in part by slaves in chains, many captured by the pirate ships of Polycrates.

“Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things”. (Hippocrates, On Ancient Medicine). Image: Zen Sparkly Texture Mosaic Large © Elena

This was the time of Theodorus, the master engineer of the age, credited among the Greeks with the invention of the key, the ruler, the carpenter’s square, the level, the lathe, bronze casting and central heating. Why are there no monuments to this man? Those who dreamed and speculated about the laws of Nature talked with the technologists and the engineers. They were often the same people. The theoretical and the practical were one.

About the same time, on the nearby island of Cos, Hippocrates was establishing his famous medical tradition, now barely remembered because of the Hippocratic oath. It was a practical and effective school of medicine, which Hippocrates insisted had to be based on the contemporary equivalent of physics and chemistry (and astrology, which was then widely regarded as a science. In a typical passage, Hippocrates writes: “One must also guard against the risings of the stars, especially of the Dog Star (Sirius), then of Archturus, and also of the setting of the Pleiades”). But it also had its theoretical side.

Empedocles

In time, the Ionian influence and the experimental method spread to the mainland of Greece, to Italy, to Sicily. There was once a time when hardly anyone believed in air. They knew about breathing, of course, and they thought the wind was the breath of the gods. But the idea of air as a static, material but invisible substance was unimagined. The first recorded experiment on air was performed by a physician named Empedocles, who flourished around 450 B.C (The experiment was performed in support of a totally erroneous theory of the circulation of the blood, but the idea of performing any experiment to probe Nature is the important innovation).

Some accounts claim Empedocles identified himself as a god. But perhaps it was only that he was so clever that others thought him a god. He believed that light travels very fast, but not infinitely fast. He taught that there was once a much greater variety of living thing on the Earth, but that many races of beings “must have been unable to beget and continue their kind. For in the case of every species that exists, either craft or courage or speed has from the beginning of its existence protected and preserved it”. In this attempt to explain the lovely adaptation of organisms to their environments, Empedocles, like Anaximander and Democritus, clearly anticipated some aspects of Darwin’s great idea of evolution by natural selection.

The ancient Greeks clearly anticipated some aspects of Darwin’s great idea of evolution by natural selection. Image: Bear Color Pencils Sketch Drawing © Megan (Elena)

Empedocles performed his experiment with a household implement people had used for centuries, the so-called clesydra or “water thief”, which was used as a kitchen ladle. A brazen sphere with an open neck and small holes in the bottom, it is filled by immersing it in water. If you pull it out with the neck uncovered, the water pours out of the holes, making a little shower. But if you pull it out properly, with your thumb covering the neck, the water is retained within the sphere until you lift your thumb. If you try to fill it with the neck covered, nothing happens. Some material substance must be in the way of the water. We cannot see such a substance. What could it be? Empedocles argued that it could only be air. A thing we cannot see can exert pressure, can frustrate my wish to fill a vessel with water if I were dumb enough to leave my finger on the neck. Empedocles had discovered the invisible. Air, he thought, must be matter in a form so finely divided that it could not be seen.

Empedocles is said to have died in an apotheotic fit by leaping into the hot lava at the summit calder of the great volcano of Aetna. But Carl Sagan said he sometimes imagined that the scientist merely slipped during a courageous and pioneering venture in observation geophysics.

The Backbone of Night

I would rather understand one cause than be King of Persia (Democritus of Abdera).

Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron Von Holbach, Système de la Nature, London, 1770:

If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon divinity, he would be oblidged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed.; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods… When, therefore he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon… does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?

When Carl Sagan was little, he lived in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in the City of New York. He knew his immediate neighborhood intimately, every apartment building, every pigeon coop, backyard, front stoop, empty lot, elm tree, ornamental railing, coal chute and wall for playing Chinese handball, among which the brick exterior of a theater called the Loew’s Stillwell was of superior quality. He knew where many people lived : Bruno and Dino, Ronald and Harvey, Sandy, Berny, Jackie, Danny and Myra. But more than a few blocks away, north of the raucous automobile traffic and elevated railway on 86th Street, was a strange unknown territory, off-limits to his wanderings. It could have been Mars for all Sagan knew.


		What are the stars in the sky? Are you sure you know the right answer? (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: Fashion Pattern Print As For Clothing by © Megan (Elena)

Even with an early bedtime, in winter, you could sometimes see the stars. Carl would look at them, twinkling and remote, and wonder what they were. He would ask other children and adults, who would only reply: “They are lights in the sky, kid”. But he could see they were lights in the sky. But what were they? Just small hovering lamps? Whatever for? He felt a kind of sorrow for them: a commonplace whose strangeness remained somehow hidden Carl’s incurious fellows. There had to be some deeper answer.

Cosmopolitans

The Ptolemys devoted much of their enormous wealth to the acquisition of every Greek book, as well as works from Africa, Persia, India, Israel and other parts of the world. Ptolemy III Euergetes wished to borrow from Athens the original manuscripts or official state copies of the great ancient tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripdes. To the Athenians, these were a kind of cultural patrimony – something like the original handwritten copies and first folios of Shakespeare might be in England. There were reluctant to let the manuscripts out of their hand even for a moment. Only after Ptolemy guaranteed their return with an enormous cash deposit did they agree to lend the plays. But Ptolemy valued those scrolls more than gold or silver. He fortfeited the deposit gladly and enshrined, as well he might, the originals in the Library. The outraged Athenians had to content themselves with the copies that Ptolemy, only a little shamefacedly, presented to them. Rarely has a state so avidly supported the pursuit of knowledge.

The Ptolemys did not merely collect established knowledge; they encouraged and financed scientific research and so generated new knowledge. The results were amazing: Eratosthenes accurately calculated the size of the Earth, mapped it, and argued that India could be reached by sailing westward from Spain. Hipparchus anticipated that stars come into being, slowly move during the course of centuries, and eventually perish; it was he who first catalogued the positions and magnitudes of the stars to detect such changes. Euclid produced a textbook on geometry from which humans learned for twenty-three centuries, a work that was to help awaken the scientific interest of Kepler, Newton and Einstein. Galen wrote basic works on healing and anatomy which dominated medicine until the Renaissance. There were, as we have noted, many others.

There were, as we have noted, many scientists in the Ancient World. None of them though discovered the mayonnaise. (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © Elena

Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People of all nations came there to live, to trade, to learn. On any given day, its harbors were thronged with merchants, scholars and tourists. This was a city where Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, Persians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Italians, Gauls and Iberians exchanged merchandise and ideas. Its is probably there that the word cosmopolitan realized the true meaning – citizen, not just of a nation, but of the Cosmos (the word cosmopolitans was first invented by Diogenes, the rationalist philosopher and critic of Plato).

Here clearly were the seeds of the modern world. But what prevented them from taking root and flourishing? Why instead did the West slumber through a thousand years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done in Alexandria? We cannot give a simple answer.

Toronto Art Street I

Graffiti cover all the territory of the city of Toronto. They can be huge or small, but they are amazing, nice, colorful and attractive. Here you can see a very small part of them. Enjoy! (You can see the second part here: Toronto Art Street II).