On 1/21/2017 5:33 PM, John Clark wrote:
I respect Greek mathematics but Greek physics was a joke, a very bad joke that was held as dogma and kept physics from advancing for nearly two thousand years. And *NOTHING* comes from Greek theology or anybody else's theology either for that matter.
You shouldn't be so hard on Greek physics. It's Aristotle and Plato's "physics" writings that happened to survive and could be interpreted as compatible with Christianity got adopted by the early Church. The school of Thales of Miletus was much better. His followers had a lot of good ideas, and what's more they made measurements and observations:
Anaximander speculated that lightning came, not from Zeus, but from the collision of clouds. He made a map of the world. Anaximander had a kind of evolutionary theory of the origin of life and of mankind. He maintained that all dying things are returning to the element from which they came. Pythagoras proved that the Earth was a spehere by noting that only a sphere could cast a circular shadow on the Moon for all alignments of the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Aristarchus of Samos put the Sun at the center of the solar system. He estimated the distance to the Sun and correctly inferred the order of the known planets. He speculated that the stars were other suns that were very far away. Democritus thought that the world consisted of atoms and the void, empty space in which the atoms fall down, but they didn't fall in perfectly straight lines – because then they would never interact. He supposed that they “swerved” slightly at random so they interacted. They had hooks and loops so that they could form combinations and it was different combinations that account for the variety we see around us. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. He invented the discipline of geography, including the terminology used today. He introduced the use of parallels and meridians on maps. He's best known as the first person to measure the size of the Earth and the tilt of the axis of the Earth both to remarkable accuracy.
If /*these*/ Greeks had their ideas promulgated by the Church, instead of Aristotle and Plato's, physics would be 900yrs further advanced now.
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