Initial Conditions

Just finished my second book (from my list, not ever), “Eureka! The Birth of Science” by Andrew Gregory. I was hoping for something less taxing than “The Trial” and that was acheived.

The book concerns how the amateur scientists of ancient Greece laid the foundations of science as we know it today, including some surprising revelations that the Greeks had basic ideas about things like gravity and (micro) evolution, things that weren’t to be thought of as fact for centuries. Most surprising of all was the realisation that the Earth was round (something frequently thought to have only been considered around the time of Columbus) and that one Geometer even found the radius of the earth to be around 400m less than the internationally agreed value of today.

There’s lots of other stuff as well, including discoveries in medicine (which were largely hampered by superstitions involving dead bodies), steam engines (invented in Alexandria) and values of Pi. It’s all quite interesting and easy to understand, and not too long either.

The most interesting revelation however, was that the ancient Greek Scientists’ main aim was to find laws of the universe to remove the myths that their gods had somehow created it (albeit from rather strange methods). It seems that some things just don’t change over two millennia.