Technology and society: impacts and relationships

¶ … Greeks commonly thought to be the inventors of scientific theory?

Long before atomic bombs were developed within the context of the Second World War, the Greek philosopher Aristotle conceived of atoms, or minute particles that made up in their essence every human body and all of creation. Without the benefit of a microscope to see beyond the experiential surface of the natural world around him, Aristotle used the power of his mind to rigorously deduce the elements of atomic theory, a theory later proven to be correct with the aid of modern technology. The Greek Aristotle also postulated the now accepted theory of physics that all matter is merely converted into a different substance and is never destroyed. (Stoll, 2005)

Thus early on, Greeks such as Aristotle, "without theocratic traditions to hold them back ... rejected monarchies at an early stage, opting for republican" systems of government, and allowed within their societies such as Athens and Alexandra a relatively free flow of intellectual thought in contrast to some other ancient kingdoms, such as Persia. Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy stand proud as the intellectual fathers of the scientific method because of their stress upon inquiry in a methodological fashion, rather than acceptance or explanation with story and myth. (Burke 15)

Rather than accepting mere evidence of the eyes, Aristotle probed the why's of the natural world, distinguishing four kinds of causes: "(1) material, (2) efficient, (3) formal, and (4) final" and stressing the explainable nature, rather than the inexplicable quality of the unseen world of atomic life. (Cited in Stoll, 2005) By breaking down the generation of nature into a series of causes, life became rational, organized, and analyzable, and one could create postulates about the world, rather than merely accept the world, hence the attribution of the father of observational science to the name of Aristotle.

Free thought was necessary as to the development of the Greek scientific method because the systems of Plato and Aristotle, "the apotheosis of Greek thought at the end of the fourth century BC," were based on "the use of opposites in argument" and the thus the rigorous scrutiny and questioning of common sense and accepted truths. Before Aristotle and his forefathers, with the "gods responsible for all aspects of the world and with minimal science and technology developed for practical necessities," a simple and comfortable "cosmology was complete" for ancient humanity. (Burke 14) Aristotle and Plato complicated this simplicity, but provided a foundation for classification of the living world, and a suggestion that observation was merely the first step in proving a theory of truth.

One of the values of Greek scientific inquiry and the postulates of early thinkers like Aristotle was that the Greeks first suggested that the human, naked eye is not the harbinger of all truth, an idea that Galileo was later to adopt in his challenge of the 'obvious' fact that the sun rotates around the earth. This is evident when Burke notes "somebody once observed to the eminent philosopher Wittgenstein how stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been," because they "assumed the earth rotates around the sun." (Burke 11) But we moderns only see such a vision of the earth's rotation because we have been taught since that the sun is the center of the universe, around which the earth orbits -- in fact, the naked eye might well lead one to believe that the earth is the center of the universe, for philosophical and psychological reasons as well as what one's observations led one to believe.

What is truly a marvel is that Aristotle was able to question beneath he surface of things and see atomic life teeming below the surface, without aid of anything but his own mind and senses. For instance, Aristotle stressed that when a statue of bronze is created, nothing new is generated -- the bronze element is merely reconfigured into something new. (Stoll, 2005) Although philosophically one might like to see the human self and soul as complete Aristotle suggested that science must probe beyond the comfortable.

Of course, nothing proved more discomforting than the idea that earth and humanity were not the center of creation -- but this was more true Galileo's time than in Ptolemy's as it should be noted that even Ptolemy's erroneous acceptance of the earth's central place in the universe was not taken on faith. While his error was accepting that the planet's orbits were circular rather than oval, and he lacked an appropriate telescope to give him a full range of information about the cosmos, he was still able to elaborate on the theory of planets in orbit, and to account for such astronomical confusion of the time, such as the apparently backward motions of some of the planets in the sky and their periodic variations in size or brightness depending on the seasons. (Smith, 2005)