Big Bang author dismisses ancient Greeks' contribution to modern science

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
by Steven Weinberg
Harper

The ancient Greek philosophers of Miletus looked for the underlying reality: Thales reportedly thought the world was made of water; Anaximander proposed a mysterious substance called the infinite; Anaximenes suggested air and Heraclitus, fire. Empedocles of Sicily nominated a mixture of water, earth, aether and sun as the fabric of all mortal things, and Democritus earned an enduring place in history with one fragment of observation: that all matter consisted of tiny particles called atoms. Sensations such as sweet and bitter existed only by convention. Reality consisted only of atoms and the void.

As they believed in an underlying reality that united all things, the ancient Greeks were like modern scientists, says Professor Steven Weinberg in his provocative new book, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. But there the similarity ends.

None of them took it upon themselves to explain how their theories about reality accounted for the appearances of things. This wasn't just intellectual laziness, says Weinberg: "There was a strain of intellectual snobbery among the early Greeks that led them to regard an understanding of appearances as not worth having."

The later and greater Greeks - the ones who left long texts that did substantiate their theories - fare no better. "I confess that I find Aristotle frequently tedious, in a way that Plato is not, but although often wrong, Aristotle is not silly, in the way that Plato sometimes is," Weinberg writes in a chapter seemingly calculated to reduce philosophers and formal science historians to apoplexy.