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Mathematics and physical science in classical antiquity
Mathematics and physical science in classical antiquity Author:Johan Ludvig Heiberg Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: thinkable without a knowledge of the mathematical treatment of the sphere. There is Pythagorean inspiration in the work of Empedocles, the poet-philosopher of... more » Agrigentum. He made no contributions to mathematics or astronomy, but he deserves a place in the history of physics as the first to introduce into science the four elements, which, from Aristotle onwards, continued to dominate it for two thousand years. The four elements, to be sure, never deserved this distinction.: they are the creatures of a purely popular point of view, not of scientific thinking. But it must not be forgotten that they form a link between the one primary substance of the Milesians and the infinitely many particles of Anaxagoras, and so mark the first step on the road which leads to modern chemistry; nor that this assumption of a minimum number of elements, capable of infinite variety of intermixture and combination, is an idea full of every kind of promise. Similar conceptions of the origins of organic life led Empedocles to views which recall Darwin : in the beginning the various parts of the body existed separately and were formed into all manner of combinations, of which only the fittest survived. In short, among all his poetical fantasies, there are many flashes of brilliant intuition. Medicine in the Fifth Century. Hippocrates Besides his other activities, Empedocles was something of a physician, though there is more than a touch of the quack about him. The Pythagoreans made important contributions to the development of medicine, the only special science which was not grounded directly upon philosophy. Their main stronghold, Croton, was famous not only for athletics but also for a flourishing school of medicine : Democedes, for some time court physicianto Darius I, belonged to it. The versa...« less