Eureka! The Birth of Science – Andrew Gregory *****

“Oh, no, not the ancient Greeks? Yawn, yawn, what a bore.” If this is your natural reaction to a book on the ancient Greek origins of science, hold on there. It’s easy enough to think of the Greeks as a bit of a bore because they tended to be long winded and philosophising (and they foisted geometry on us, for goodness sake) – but the fact is that their work, mostly wrong though it may be, is the foundation of all of science.

What’s more, Andrew Gregory makes the whole business interesting, without resorting to any fancy literary tricks – it’s a straightforward historical tour of the Greek prehistory of science that is simply bursting with insight. If you’ve ever wondered why it was such a big deal that Galileo and others should suggest that the Earth wasn’t at the centre of things, here is part of the explanation. It’s not just a matter of selfish assumption, but the entire Aristotelian physics depended on it. Without the Earth at the centre of things, his equivalent of gravity simply wouldn’t work.

Because so much of the actual detail is wrong, it’s also easy to dismiss the ancient Greeks’ input to science – but, as Gregory emphasizes, it was a huge leap to move from the assumption that the cause of natural events and objects was mythological and down to the intervention of gods, to a rule-based cosmos where it was possible to deduce a logical explanation for events. He contrasts, for instance, the Babylonians and Egyptians, who achieved great technological feats, and were quite capable of recording and predicting natural events, but who resolutely put the explanation of why down to supernatural intervention, and who consistently resorted to inconsistent myth to explain how the cause was working.

Some would argue that Gregory has been a little premature – that the ancient Greeks weren’t so much the earliest part of the history of science, but the prehistory of science. To make this distinction, what the Greeks did is often called natural philosophy, based on observation and argument, as opposed to science, based on observation, experiment and the development and refinement of theory from those observations and experiments. So it’s worth taking a look at least three other books that ascribe the birth of science to later midwifes:

Medieval friar Roger Bacon in my Roger Bacon: The First Scientist
Leonardo da Vinci in Michael White’s Leonardo, and
Galileo in John Gribbin’s Science: A History

but even they would agree with Gregory how significant the ancient Greeks foundations are, and the great thing is to get a very effective grounding in these Greek ideas in a single, compact and enjoyable book. Nice one.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Search This Blog