BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER ONE

WORK AND ENERGY

When and where what we now call science started, nobody knows. But we do know that it slowly grew from humans awe at the heavens and from the arts of healing, hunting, construction, and war. Seeds of it appeared during the Stone Age, in the invention of such hunting implements as the bow and arrow. While the early hunters surely did not try to understand the flight of the arrow, the arrows effectiveness depended on the predictability of its flight, which was taken for granted.

GALAXIES

Interest in the heavens served less practical purposes and may therefore perhaps be regarded as the proper precursor of pure science, but that interest seems always to have been closely associated with religion. Individual stars were identified either with specific gods or with the homes of deities. Capricious as the gods were in general, the regular movements of their celestial images offered a reassuring sign of order, while unusual events such as eclipses of the moon or the sun were frightening disruptions of that order.

Anyone able to predict these unsettling phenomena was regarded as possessing extraordinary powers. Though it could be found in other places as well, an intense interest in the movements of the heavenly bodies is definitely known to have existed quite early in Egypt, as the development of its stellar-based calendar clearly shows; this calendar can be traced back as far as 4236 bce. (Note the precision, probably the earliest known date in history.) The construction of a calendar, of course, is the surest sign of faith in the regularity of daily life.

MEASUREMENT
Along with such proto-scientific learning, Egyptian technology became increasingly sophisticated as well. The measurements of blocks used for the pyramids constructed during the thirtieth century BCE are remarkably precise; for example, the leveling of a 50-foot beam was done correctly with an error of only 0.02 inches. The accuracyof three granite sarcophagi of Senusert II, Twelfth Dynasty (20001788), averages 0.004 inches from a straight line in some parts, 0.007 inches in others, according to the science historian George Sarton.

TIME
The Mesopotamian civilizations directed their quasiscientific attention primarily toward astronomy and commerce. Sumerian astronomers began by constructing a lunar calendar, which they later modified, assuming the year consisted of 360 days and dividing the day into 12 equal hours, the legacy of which echoed through the ages. But the greatest astronomical achievements of the later Babylonians were many extremely detailed lunar and stellar observations, and in particular an accurate tabulation of the rising and setting of the planet Venus.

ROTATION

As we now know, the motion is caused by a precession of the axis of rotation of the Earth, so that the inclination of this axis with respect to the ecliptic wobbles with a period of about 26,000 years. Historians therefore have good reason to regard the Babylonians as the founders of an early form of scientific astronomy. Two hundred years later, the precession of the equinoxes was clearly discovered by the great Greek astronomer Hipparchus, albeit relying not only on his own observations but also on early Babylonian star data, without which he could not have made the discovery.

GEOMETRY

In geometry, the Babylonians knew the areas of right and isosceles triangles, as well as the volumes of a rectangular parallelepiped (a solid with six faces, each a parallelogram), of a right circular cylinder, and of the frustum of a square pyramid. There is also convincing evidence that they had some knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem, but in circular measurements they were behind the contemporary Egyptians: the Egyptian value of 3.16 for was closer to its correct value of approximately 3.14 than the Babylonian value of 3.

THE GREEK MIRACLE

THE GREEK MIRACLE

Many of the proto-scientific ideas of the early Greeks had their roots in the Egyptian and Babylonian traditions they inherited.

That

are art of astronomical observation and a knowledge of specific regularities such as the 18-year cycle, called the saros, which brought the moon and the sun in the same relative position, enabling the more or less reliable prediction of eclipses

Real science was just one component of a sudden emergence of high culture, beginning in the sixth century bce, that is sometimes hailed as the Greek miracle.

There was some great scientist lived in this age. Some of them are: * Thales of miletos * Anaximander of Miletos * Pythagoras * Empedocles * Democritus of Abdera * Aristotle * Archimedes

There are a lot of scientist expand on that age. But if we concerns to physics develop then we get if physics growth steadily on this age.

Some of them are :

1.

Several different models of the solar system and the cosmos were put forward, but the one closest to the modern view, the heliocentric model of Aristarchus, was generally ignored in favor of a complicated geocentric construction by Ptolemy.

2. the

overarching conviction carried by scientifically knowledgeable philosophers was that nature was orderly, subject to regular rules, and deterministic. This was perhaps the most significant scientific legacy of classical Greece.

3. Discovered of hydrostatis by archimedes. the weight of a body wholly or partially immersed in a fluid is reduced by an amount equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces.