Yes, in MythBusters context, sitting around talking about stuff doesn’t qualify as screwing around. It is, at best, the thing you do to prepare for screwing around.
My understanding is that they had the screwing-around, despite some philosophers not doing it. They didn’t have the concept that the results of screwing-around was more virtuous than the philosophy.
To say that the Greeks didn’t have correct scientific theories is obviously true. To say that they had a methodology that departs from ours is somewhat true. To say that they were merely making stuff up without reference to any observation is to merely make stuff up without reference to any observation.
I could do someone significant bodily harm by hitting them with Aristotle’s collected empirical works on the anatomies, reproductive systems, social habits, and forms of locomotion of animals. And I’m not a huge dude.
The ancients achieved less science because they were less scientific in ideology or culture; because they had mistaken ideas about the relative virtue of experiment and philosophy.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the precision equipment that modern scientists have.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the generations of accumulation of information that modern scientists benefit from.
The ancients achieved less science because there were fewer of them, population-wise. Fewer people → fewer Einsteins.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked a large-scale scientific community; developments were isolated to their developers’ city-states.
The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been deliberately suppressed by political and religious censorship and so we haven’t heard of it.
The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been accidentally lost in fires, floods, wars, or other disasters where they hadn’t taken adequate backups.
9. Scientific advancement requires that in each generation, your culture acquires more knowledge about the world than it loses — and there are a lot of ways for a culture to lose knowledge; among them mortality, library fires, Alzheimer’s, censorship, tech bubbles, faddish beliefs or cults, pareidolia, political propaganda, shame, anti-epistemology, language change, revolt of the masses, economic collapse rendering high-tech/high-knowledge trades untenable, superstitiogenesis¹, the madness of crowds, and other noise. In the absence of really good schooling, literacy, anti-censorship memes, skepticism memes, and economic resilience, the noise is likely to dominate the signal, driving cultures back towards subsistence and ignorant superstition — a condition in which beliefs are no more correlated with reality than is needed to keep you alive from day to day. However, the difference is basically quantitative (how much is preserved?) rather than qualitative (some cultures Have It and others Don’t).
10. It’s just too hard to maintain the technology base for scientific advancement with 1% literacy; there’s just too much chance of losing it due to correlated death of the literate class — plagues; king decides to kill all the scribes and burn the books; barbarians invade and do the same; etc.
¹ any process by which new superstitions are created
Export-oriented slavery in the Americas was actually fairly technically dynamic, so if this is really the explanation I suspect it’s because slave societies lack a mass consumer base.
*10. The ancients achieved less science because they cared less than we do about the actual goals science was useful for. (Later generations cared even less and forgot most of what was already known by the ancients.)
*11. The ancients achieved less science due to lack of research funding models. All funding was private and rich people were patrons to artists, not scientists.
I think that we can dismiss 2. because they did make precision devices when they wanted to (see the Antikythera Mechanism). If this had been the limiting factor they should have been able to reach at least the level we had in the nineteenth century.
“Virtue” has a specific meaning in the ancient Greek world which doesn’t seem like it’s all that relevant here.
The way I would put it is that a clever Greek interested in the natural world became an engineer, and a clever Greek interested in the social world became an active citizen, which is a sort of combination of landlord, lawyer, and philosopher. Archimedes made his living by basically being the iron-punk hero of Syracuse; Plato and Aristotle made their living by teaching young rich folks how to be effective rich adults. A broad-minded citizen should be curious about the natural world, but curiosity is just a hobby, not a calling.
My impression was that it was the screwing around that was lacking.
-Galen, a Roman doctor/philosopher, on Asclepiades’s unwillingness to admit that the kidneys processed urine—despite Galen demonstrating the function of the kidneys to Asclepiades by, well, cutting open a live animal and pointing to the urine flowing from its kidneys to its bladder (search the page for “ligatures” to find Galen’s experiment described), among other things.
And in case it’s not obvious to readers, the Greeks were huge fans of irony—the above quote should be read sarcastically.
Yes, in MythBusters context, sitting around talking about stuff doesn’t qualify as screwing around. It is, at best, the thing you do to prepare for screwing around.
My understanding is that they had the screwing-around, despite some philosophers not doing it. They didn’t have the concept that the results of screwing-around was more virtuous than the philosophy.
To say that the Greeks didn’t have correct scientific theories is obviously true. To say that they had a methodology that departs from ours is somewhat true. To say that they were merely making stuff up without reference to any observation is to merely make stuff up without reference to any observation.
I could do someone significant bodily harm by hitting them with Aristotle’s collected empirical works on the anatomies, reproductive systems, social habits, and forms of locomotion of animals. And I’m not a huge dude.
How would we compare these hypotheses?
The ancients achieved less science because they were less scientific in ideology or culture; because they had mistaken ideas about the relative virtue of experiment and philosophy.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the precision equipment that modern scientists have.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the generations of accumulation of information that modern scientists benefit from.
The ancients achieved less science because there were fewer of them, population-wise. Fewer people → fewer Einsteins.
The ancients achieved less science because they lacked a large-scale scientific community; developments were isolated to their developers’ city-states.
The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been deliberately suppressed by political and religious censorship and so we haven’t heard of it.
The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been accidentally lost in fires, floods, wars, or other disasters where they hadn’t taken adequate backups.
The ancients achieved a lot of science, but it wasn’t applied much to create technology because they had access to cheap slave labor.
9. Scientific advancement requires that in each generation, your culture acquires more knowledge about the world than it loses — and there are a lot of ways for a culture to lose knowledge; among them mortality, library fires, Alzheimer’s, censorship, tech bubbles, faddish beliefs or cults, pareidolia, political propaganda, shame, anti-epistemology, language change, revolt of the masses, economic collapse rendering high-tech/high-knowledge trades untenable, superstitiogenesis¹, the madness of crowds, and other noise. In the absence of really good schooling, literacy, anti-censorship memes, skepticism memes, and economic resilience, the noise is likely to dominate the signal, driving cultures back towards subsistence and ignorant superstition — a condition in which beliefs are no more correlated with reality than is needed to keep you alive from day to day. However, the difference is basically quantitative (how much is preserved?) rather than qualitative (some cultures Have It and others Don’t).
10. It’s just too hard to maintain the technology base for scientific advancement with 1% literacy; there’s just too much chance of losing it due to correlated death of the literate class — plagues; king decides to kill all the scribes and burn the books; barbarians invade and do the same; etc.
¹ any process by which new superstitions are created
I hoped the footnote would exemplify some such processes...
Export-oriented slavery in the Americas was actually fairly technically dynamic, so if this is really the explanation I suspect it’s because slave societies lack a mass consumer base.
*10. The ancients achieved less science because they cared less than we do about the actual goals science was useful for. (Later generations cared even less and forgot most of what was already known by the ancients.)
*11. The ancients achieved less science due to lack of research funding models. All funding was private and rich people were patrons to artists, not scientists.
I think that we can dismiss 2. because they did make precision devices when they wanted to (see the Antikythera Mechanism). If this had been the limiting factor they should have been able to reach at least the level we had in the nineteenth century.
I guess that several of those had a non-negligible impact.
“Virtue” has a specific meaning in the ancient Greek world which doesn’t seem like it’s all that relevant here.
The way I would put it is that a clever Greek interested in the natural world became an engineer, and a clever Greek interested in the social world became an active citizen, which is a sort of combination of landlord, lawyer, and philosopher. Archimedes made his living by basically being the iron-punk hero of Syracuse; Plato and Aristotle made their living by teaching young rich folks how to be effective rich adults. A broad-minded citizen should be curious about the natural world, but curiosity is just a hobby, not a calling.