Lindberg, final thoughts

With the exception of Ibn Al Haytham and Archimedes, ancient science just doesn't do it for me. Not at all.  But I plowed through to the end.  If I had to take away one thing, it would be this:  Ancient and medieval science might not have left us with many ideas that survive to the present in a robust form, but they laid the intellectual groundwork for having scholarly classes who would devote serious thought to the natural world and the application of logic and mathematics to questions about the world.  That's not something to sneeze at.  To this day, the most fertile grounds for producing scientists are often liberal arts colleges, who recruit students of a certain intellectual bent.

Lindberg, Chapter 8

The main takeaway is that Muslim science was what Kuhn would call "normal science" within the framework of Greek science, but before we see that as damning we should remember that almost all of modern science is "normal science."

An Epicurean approach to physics

I'm at the end of chapter 7 of Lindberg, and it's really hard to get interested in ancient science, to be honest.  I get why it's historically significant, but most of it does absolutely nothing for me.  The only highlight, interestingly, was Epicurus.  Like Democritus, he was an atomist.  I can't say a lot in favor of the evidentiary basis for Greek atomism, but Lindberg makes a powerful case for Epicurus' analysis of the problem:  If all things are made of atoms, and (according to the Aristotelian paradigm of the day) it is in the nature of matter to fall toward the center of the universe (presumed back then to be at the center of the earth) then why isn't the world a perfectly spherical blob of atoms?  Epicurus' solution was to include a bit of randomness, thereby preserving room for symmetry-breaking and also non-deterministic behavior (which Greek philosophers contemplated alongside the problem of free will).  He was contemplating things that are still central to Big Questions in physics, and he was contemplating them for many of the same reasons that we do.  Greek atomism may have been a happy coincidence of speculation that proved to be accurate, but Epicurus' analysis of the problem deserves the respect of even a hard-nosed modern physicist.

Lindberg, chapter 1-3

Honestly, the really ancient science, being so wrong, just doesn't appeal to me.  Yes, yes, I'm aware of the significance of Aristotle, and I understand why philosophers and historians would pay attention to him.  Be that as it may, it's just really hard to motivate myself to pay attention to him.  Still, Lindberg made one point that I liked:  Aristotle didn't eschew experiment simply because he was too dumb to understand the value of it, or because he was too elitist to dirty himself with hands-on science; indeed, he seemed to enjoy dissection.  However, he considered observation and reasoning superior to experimentation because experimentation requires one to manipulate the system in unnatural ways, thereby perturbing the findings.  The experimental method is nowadays sold as common sense, or even intellectual humility, but that humility is advertised with considerable arrogance at times.  It actually takes quite a bit of careful thought to judge that an experiment is telling you something about the "natural" world (whatever that is), rather than just giving you experimental artifacts.

Next book: The Beginnings of Western Science

My next book for this blog will be The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg.  I'm only a couple pages in, but I like that he begins by dispensing with the question of what is or isn't science and when precisely it began.  I've seen people argue that the first scientist was Ibn Al Haytham a thousand years ago, Galileo 400 years ago, or someone even later, but everyone would agree that even if those guys weren't (by whatever notion) scientists, they were at least part of a tradition of ideas that built toward science as we now know and practice it.

On a different note, last night I saw "Avenue Q" on my campus, a musical that is full of offensive speech and stereotypes.  I've spent a lot of time recently complaining about the new wave of political correctness in higher education, so it's only fair that I balance that by pointing out what's going right.