Science: antiquity and its legacy

Science: antiquity and its legacy - Philippa Lang ***

There is a lot of nonsense talked about Ancient Greek 'science', so it was genuinely interesting to get a clearer picture of who came up with in the capable hands of ex-classics professor Philippa Lang. Although written in an academic style, the book is approachable and fills in a lot of detail I've not come across elsewhere on the contradictory contributions of different Greek philosophers, organised by topics that vary from the origins of the universe to their decidedly fuzzy ideas about women. (Despite the received wisdom that some of the Greek philosophers were married, you get the impression they'd seen women from a distance, but certainly never got as far as a date.)

Rather less successful is the 'legacy' part of the book - the attempt to lay the ideas about nature from antiquity alongside modern ones in order to compare and contrast. There are two problems here. One is the tendency (despite regularly emphasising the very different approaches then and now) that pointing out similarities that are nothing more than inevitable coincidence will imply more significance than is deserved, fodder for the 'wonders of ancient wisdom' brigade.

The other, and worse, problem is that the modern science presented here is sometimes a little adrift from modern scientific content. So, for instance, we have the Big Bang placed 15 billion years ago, the many worlds hypothesis confused with the multiverse concept, and a rather hazy conception of dark matter and dark energy in one chapter alone. A co-author might have been recommended to make the comparisons less ineffective.

At its worst, the science part is downright confusing, even occasionally when talking about the ancients, e.g. In saying 'As a matter of fact, heavier objects do usually fall faster than lighter ones in atmosphere, because a heavier object is usually a larger object, which means that there is a larger area to be affected by air resistance.' This just doesn't make sense, as being larger will tend to slow down an object rather than speed it up (try dropping a sheet of paper opened flat at the same time as a piece scrunched in a ball).

Luckily for the reader, though, the tendency to bring in details of modern science fades out after the first couple of chapters (unless you count the likes of Darwin as modern), and the text settles down to a more accurate portrayal. I'm not sure this is a book for every popular science fan, but for anyone looking to get a better grounding of why 'science' in antiquity was both more and less than we tend to think of it, Science: antiquity and its legacy is recommended reading.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog