"Benford-TheFireThisTime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

GREGORY BENFORD

THE FIRE THIS TIME

SCIENCE was invented once, and only once.

This is a singularly striking fact of human history. There were many
opportunities for science to emerge, in the sense that we know it -- the
reasonably dispassionate search for objective, checkable troths about the
physical world. The Egyptians and Babylonians had lots of rule-of-thumb
engineering and geometry. The Romans could build magnificently. The Chinese
invented paper, gunpowder, rockets, the great sailing vessels of the Ming era.

Yet none devised the rather abstract rules which govern scientific discourse. No
rival to Euclid's Elements. No deductive mathematics. No Chinese or Indian or
African theorems or proofs before they learned from Euclid.

Indeed, truly modern science emerged only half a millennium ago. The term
"science," from the Latin, "to know," is less than two centuries old. Before
that science existed but was called "natural philosophy." Science as we know it
came at the hands of William of Ockham, Francis Bacon, and then the great
experimenters, Galileo and his contemporaries. The crowning jewel was the
systematic, mathematical description of the most classically serene part of the
world, celestial dynamics, by Newton.

They all built on the Greeks, who invented the basic idea of the method. Along
the shore of that rough peninsula, over two thousand years ago, the methods of
careful reasoning, always braced by consultation with the facts of the matter,
evolved and won through.

Not that all Greeks held to it, of course. Aristotle lusted after the great
intellectual leaps. He was impatient with facts and seldom checked his many
assertions. Simple enough, one would think, to see if a heavy ball of the same
size as a light one fell to earth at a different rate. But it was nearly two
thousand years before Galileo looked to see, and found the truth.

I loved Greece and was immediately drawn to it. My first visit there led to an
entire novel about Mycenean archeology, Artifact. I grew up on a warm sea's
edge, and live in Laguna Beach, California now because I simply love the rub and
scent of the sea. More, I admire the cutting clarity of the air--sharper than
the Gulf coast where I grew up, but sharing a smell of brine and eternal organic
consequence.

I sometimes think that the Greeks developed their Euclidean certainties, their
sharp visions of cause and circumscribed effect, because they lived in an air of
razor clarity. The dry, lucid accuracies of Athenian air may have kindled in the
ancient mind some vision of a realm beyond the raw rub of the day, a province of
the eternal which obeyed finer laws, more graceful dynamics.