Dawn Of The Scientific Method

Thales and Democritus Change the Basis of Man’s Thinking

Phoebus was the sun: he wore brilliant robes, of gold, or red or purple, even green, often slipping on the red one as his daily chariot trip across the heavens ended, so that of a sudden the whole earth was bathed in rosy light. When the journey was over, and Phoebus had dismounted from his chariot, those with the blessing of the gods could visit him in his temple, find him sitting on his throne, a throne that sparkled and burnt with emeralds. On his right and left were the gods of the Day, the Month, the Year, and the Century. Even the Hours, little fellows, were standing side by side, with exactly the same distance between each one and his fellow. Not only this: there was Spring in a robe of flowers; Summer garlanded with ears of golden corn, sheaves of wheat; Autumn with her dress stained purple from the juice of grapes; and scowling Winter, with his white, dishevelled hair. They held court each night, while the world slumbered. Then, in the morning, when the Moon-Goddess had ended her own nocturnal dash across the heavens, Phoebus would set off again, in his fiery chariot, galloping across the sky, while the others went about their business.

Iuppiter Tonans

Of all this, there could be no doubt: for centuries, men had known it, been brought up with it, accepted it as fact. Any unusual behaviour in the heavens: a sudden storm, eclipse of the sun, heat wave or flood, could be ascribed to the irrational behaviour of the gods. Often, of course, man had a hand in his destiny, was unwittingly its cause. Old men told stories of the Flood, when there had been such wickedness on earth, when men had behaved so vilely to each other, had shown such little respect for the gods, that Jupiter, King of the Gods, had let loose the South Wind, with thunderclouds upon Ms brow, to bring down rain. He had struck, men said, with his fist; there had been thunder, the heavens had opened. Water had poured down, torrents of it, beating men’s crops into the earth. Iris, Juno’s messenger, dressed in the colours of the rainbow, had brought jugs of water to the clouds, to feed them: the rain never stopped. Then Neptune, Jupiter’s brother, god of the Sea, took a hand. There were tidal waves and floods, and soon the earth was a mighty sea, a sea without a shore.

All this was history, made sacrosanct by the gods themselves. If a man were fool enough to question any part of it, express any doubt, even to himself, the gods would come down and punish him: his children would turn upon him, his wife would vanish; as when Jupiter, turning himself into a bull, ran off with the young and beautiful Europa on his back.

Thales

In about the year 600 B.C., there came what can only be called an explosion, an explosion in men’s thinking. In the town of Miletus, in the ancient Greek state of Ionia, was born Thales, and to this man belongs the credit.

Thales was a member of one of the great families of Ionia, in an age where the differences between social classes, between soldiers, merchants, philosophers, slaves, were of greater account than the differences between races. There were, living proudly together in the little state, men of every language and complexion, from all corners of the ancient world, all of them proud to be members of such a community. Thales was a man of initiative, with sufficient wealth to be able to indulge it: he travelled to Egypt, to the interior of Asia Minor, to Chaldea; and there he absorbed ideas that the people of these countries had collected over the centuries.

He noted that their myths, tales of their gods and their doings, were different to his own, though often they differed only in the names of the gods. But scattered among these strangers’ stories were grains of information, complementary information which Thales on his return began to assemble. His motive was not just pure research, a seeking for knowledge because it was there: it was a severely practical exercise, because Thales was a practical man. He was a merchant and an engineer; his livelihood depended on the safe arrival of ships bearing his goods from the ends of the earth. Slowly, he divested his mind of gods, so that he could look to the sky and treat stars, for the first time in history, as entirely natural objects, made of earth and fire. He was the first to predict that when the moon, no goddess, this, just a lump of earth, came between earth and sun, there would be an eclipse. We do not know whether in fact he predicted the eclipses of 610 and 585 B.C., but we know that he predicted their possibility.

He made charts of the heavens, proved to the wondering men of Miletus that these could be used for safe navigation across the sea. Indeed, men had used the stars in much this way for years, but treating them with suspicion, as unreliable gods and goddesses with human attributes, likely as not to alter their positions or obscure each other, just to cause shipwreck. Now, in this dawn of scientific thought, all changed. The stars were there, but they were physical, material things, not helped or hindered by the gods; and they had practical uses.

For example, as Thales proved, the Little Bear in the heavens, and of course, as he pointed out, it was no bear, it hardly even looked like one, could be a better guide for sailors than the Great Bear, even though the Great one had been deemed to rule the heavens. He and those of his Ionian school developed processes of stellar navigation we use to-day. Then, having proved them accurate, Thales went on to establish a means of telling the distance of a ship at sea. In the past this had been a matter of guesswork, good eyesight. A ship, viewed as a tiny object on the horizon, would be farther in the distance than a similar one appearing larger: if half as big, it was twice as far, though even this was guesswork. Thales established that by measuring two angles to the ship from opposite ends of a measured distance on the shore, the range to the ship could be calculated exactly. In the same way, the height of a mountain could be calculated by measuring the horizontal distance to its base, and the vertical angle to its summit.

But Thales’s discoveries were not confined to the sciences of geometry and navigation, though he is best remembered for his contributions to them. He set off such an explosion of scientific thinking, that everything from architecture to commerce was rethought, done differently. It was in his native Ionia that men came to realize the squat columns of the Doric temple need not be thick and ugly; that columns, scientifically designed, could be slender, elegant and beautiful, and still hold up a single roof. It was in Ionia that men rediscovered coined money; that banking and bills of exchange began to be used. Many of these devices had been tried, one by one, and rejected, in more ancient times: now they were re-thought, given new uses, by this eager people, fired with the spirit of Thales.

Though the gods had been relegated to their proper place, the people of Ionia did not reject them. Gods were there, but man still had control over his destiny in this world; the gods need not be invoked, consulted, placated, at every crossroads in his life. For years men had observed phenomena, “red sky at night, sailors’ delight”, is an axiom that goes back thousands of years, and had made use of them, one by one. Now, with the birth of scientific thought, these phenomena were assembled: men saw that one was often closely bound up with a dozen more, that hypotheses could be constructed from them. If the hypotheses fitted the knowledge available and were plausible, they were valuable: they could be proved or disproved later. In the meantime, the coming of rains, warm weather, the duration of a journey, the height of the highest mountain, the distance to the horizon, the depth of the sea, the total interest on a loan, all these could be observed or calculated. Trade could be made a thousand times simpler, less laborious, more profitable, by the use of money. No longer was it necessary to swap a basket of olives for a pair of sandals: one could part with the olives in exchange for a silver coin, and buy whatever one wanted when one wanted it.

Because he was a famous man, much of what Thales did has been obscured in the mists of time. Any new invention, any theory that saw the light of day was immediately ascribed to him, even after his death, and we have little means of finding out which particular discoveries were his own. We can be certain, though, that he established a climate of opinion, a desire for truth and a habit of hard, constructive thinking, which made what followed possible. He built a bridge between the ancient world of myth and the world of reason: man, cautious at first, terrified lest the bridge break and leave him stranded out of reach of his gods crossed it.

Anaxagoras

As we have seen, Thales set scientific, rational thought in motion, and others, inspired by his example, clamoured to follow. Scientists like Anaxagoras and Empedocles went further than he did, developed his ideas of astronomy, expanded his meagre tally of geometrical theorems, and blazed a trail to the two great discoveries of the fifth century B.C. These were an exact knowledge of the annual movement of the sun in the heavens, and the determination of musical intervals, the discovery that every note has an exact mathematical relationship with every other.

The fifth century was the century of Democritus, perhaps the greatest of the Greek scientists or physical “philosophers”. He, like Thales, was a rich man and a traveller, born in about the year 460 B.C., in Abdera, a Greek colony on the coast of Thrace. His thinking was more fundamental than that of Thales, with less immediate practical application: he established, or at least predicted, for few men of his age would believe him, that everything in the universe is composed of atoms, moving in a vacuum. This theory has been proved correct, even though the twentieth century has succeeded in subdividing the atom. (Democritus maintained it was indivisible, and the word, which he coined, means just that.)

Democritus

He devoted his thinking to the study of these minute bodies (they jostle each other in every direction” he noted) and explained the sensations of heat and cold, sweetness, bitterness, even colour, by the different shapes, weight and speed of atoms. Correctly, he established that the earth is formed of the heaviest ones, that the lightest form the atmosphere about us. He made researches into body and soul, discarding, as Thales had done, all the mythology of gods entering into and leaving the bodies of men; he studied theology for, like Thales, he did not deny the existence of god or a god; he analysed the relationship between perception and knowledge; and he tried to establish a code of ethics.

Democritus needed courage for his work, for, by and large, he was hated and distrusted during his lifetime. Many of his ideas were two thousand years and more ahead of their time. But some of them were taken up, developed, by others after him; men like Euclid and Archimedes, and Greek science flourished and grew.

Yet, sadly, it did not endure. There came a time when the forces which had made, over hundreds of years, every effort to reject the findings and conclusions of men like Democritus and Thales, were successful. Suddenly, there were no more like them, and their ideas were buried and forgotten.

Science slumbered through the Middle Ages, before being awakened at the Renaissance, but here it was taken up from the point at which it had been rejected. Somehow the findings, the methods, of the ancient Greek philosophers, scientists as we would call them now, had survived: mankind was able to use them and push on to the frontiers of knowledge in our present day. Many of the writings of men like Democritus were lost or destroyed, but those that survive show us how advanced was their thinking and how much in their debt we are. Indeed, if we study ultimate theories of life and the universe around us, we find that little has changed, fundamentally, since these first great strides in man’s thinking were taken, over two thousand years ago. As a present-day student of Democritus has put it: “In the last analysis, the picture of the universe is the same for us as it was for Democritus: an inconceivable number of corpuscles disseminated in limitless space, and moving eternally.”

Man’s gods are there still, but Thales and Democritus, and the men who followed in their footsteps, removed them from man’s world of science and calculation. Gently, but firmly, they put them back, out of harm’s way, in the heavens.