The Greeces History of Science

Science was a important thing of human civilization in greek. The greek

believed to fairytale, myths and superstitions, but in the long run they began to leaved
their mythology and began to believed in nature and science. Because people have
always been lived in the earth that so large and mystery. They want to known about
this earthly fully and for the first time the philosophy of earthly was developed. The
greeces philosophy period was makes people mintosentrys become logosentrys. The
concept mintosentrys was people who rely in the myths to explanation phenomenon
of nature.
The earliest they believed that the Gods and Goddesses who controlled this
world, until they aware the regularities in nature activity: the sun rises every day; the
moon appears at the same place in the sky roughly every twenty-seven days about the
same as a woman's menstrual cycle; the seasons always follow in the same order; the
pattern of the "fixed" stars (all the heavenly bodies except for the planets, sun, moon
and comets) repeats itself at the same time every year; snowflakes all have six points;
a dropped stone always falls. In fact, the very well-being of a family depended until
recent times on knowing when to plant, or when to move camp for the next season's
game.
Ancient greece phases was regarded to be in light of philosophy, because in
this phases people could given their idea and opinion freely. The greece state dislike
to accept something that its accuracy not fix, but they want to make observe it with
carefully so they become a genius person all of the time and have dubbed as nature
philosopher.
Notable/philosopher and expert Ancient greeks phases
1. Pythagoras (582-500 B.C.) and his followers belonged to a religious fraternity
dedicated to the study of numbers. They believed that the world, like the whole
number system, was divided into finite elements, an early precursor to the idea of
atoms ("atom" means "indivisible").
2. The Greeks Leucippus (~440 B.C.), Democritus (~420 B.C.) and Epicurus (342270 B.C.) put forward the hypothesis that matter was composed of extremely
small atoms, with different materials being composed of different combinations
of these atoms. At the time just according their known without did the
experiment, they said that Atom means a substance or material indivisible.
3. Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 B.C.) is the first person known to have proposed
that the earth rotates once per year around the sun, rather than the intuitive
explanation that the sun rotates around the earth. He also attempted to calculate
relative sizes for the earth, moon and sun. However, it was not considered
necessary by the Greeks to test such hypotheses experimentally; all that most of
them were looking for was a self-consistent explanation of the world based on a
small number of philosophical principles.

4. Aristotle is generally credited with providing the most comprehensive of such

explanations. He believed that there were four earthly elements: earth, water, air
and fire. Each had its natural place determined by its weight. Earth, being the
heaviest, "wanted" to be at the centre of the universe. Water was above the earth,
with air above water, and then fire. This order makes intuitive sense. Solid
("earthy") bodies sink in water; if you release air under water the air bubbles to
the surface; and flames leap upward during burning. (Wood could float even
though it was a solid body, because it contained both earth and fire; the fire was
released on burning.) The farther a body was from the earth, the more perfect it
became. Hence the moon was the least perfect of the heavenly bodies, as could
be seen by its uneven appearance, while the fixed stars were the most perfect of
all, and were composed of a fifth element (the "quintessence") which had no
weight at all.
In Aristotle's physics, a moving body of any mass had to be in contact with
a "mover", something which caused its motion, or it would stop. This mover
could either be internal as for animals, or external as in the case of a bowstring
pushing on an arrow. The arrow was kept in flight by air displaced from the front
rushing to the back to fill the vacuum left by the arrow. Since Aristotle said that a
vacuum was impossible ("nature abhors a vacuum"), this explanation of an
arrow's motion was again internally consistent. However, because the stars were
without mass, once they were put in motion by a "prime mover" they could
continue to move by themselves.
The Greeks spent much effort trying to explain the motion of the sun, moon,
planets and stars. Since this motion also played a major role in the development
of modern science, it is worth discussing in some detail. The stars are so far from
us that their relative motions cannot be observed except over timescales of a few
centuries. Therefore, to someone standing on the earth the stars appear to be
fixed in a vast sphere, concentric with the earth. This sphere rotates at constant
speed about the earth at a rate of just more than once in twenty-four hours,
returning to almost the same position at a given time of day once every year.
Similarly, the sun and moon appear to lie on spheres, which rotate about the
earth once per day and once every 27 days, respectively. The motions of the
planets appear much more complicated to an earthly observer. We now know that
the planets are all on orbits with different average distances from the sun, and
orbital periods that increase the farther the planet is from the sun. For example
Venus, Earth's nearest and brightest planetary neighbour, has a period of 225
days, compared to Earth's 365. This means that as Venus makes its annual
pilgrimage through the night sky as viewed from Earth, it occasionally
moves backwards relative to the fixed stars, in "retrograde motion", as its orbit
carries it opposite to the direction the earth is moving. (Hence the name "planet",
meaning "wanderer".)
5. Eudoxus of Cnidus (409-356 B.C.), who was apparently the first Greek to use
quantitative observation to develop a mathematical description. Noting that the

motion of the planets was periodic, he developed a system of spheres each of

which carried a planet, with each sphere centred on the earth but with its axis of
rotation fixed in a larger sphere. This explanation fitted with the Greek belief that
the circle was the most perfect geometrical form. However, this system was
approximate at best. Apollonius of Perga (~220 B.C.) suggested, instead, that
each planet was attached to a small sphere which, in turn, rolled on a large
sphere centred on the earth, with the larger one rotating roughly once per day.
The large sphere accounted for the daily motion of the planet, while the small
one (the "epicycle") explained the retrograde motion. A later addition was the use
of the "eccentric", which allowed the centre of rotation of the large sphere for
each planet to lie away from the centre of Earth.
6. Hipparchus of Nicea (190-120 B.C.) who had studied the observational records
of the earlier Greeks and Babylonians, with the latter dating back to the seventh
century B.C. In this process, Hipparchus discovered the "precession of the
equinoxes"; that is, that it takes the sun about 20 seconds more to return to its
position at the equinox every year than it does to return to its position among the
fixed stars. To satisfy the need for accurate data, Hipparchus catalogued the
position and brightness of 1080 stars
7. Ptolemy (85-165 A.D.), who observed at Alexandria in Egypt, the system of
system of epicycles and eccentrics required eighty circles to describe the known
periodicities of the heavens.
8. Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), scientist-engineer, has been described as one of the
three greatest geniuses of all time [Kramer]. He invented the Archimedean screw
for raising water, discovered the principle of buoyancy of a body in a liquid, and
calculated an accurate value for p, among other accomplishments.
In light of his future influence on the course of European science, it is of interest
to look at Aristotle's attitude towards the role of women. In his "Generation of
Animals" he says, "Wherever possible and so far as possible the male is separate
from the female, since [he] is something better and more divine in that [he] is the
principle of movement for generated things, while the female serves as their
matter ... We should look upon the female state as it were a deformity, though
one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature