The ancient Greeks referred to the Universe as the cosmos, which implied to them more than just physical existence: their concept was that of a physical system that has order, harmony, and beauty among its parts and in the dynamic and coherent arrangement of those parts.
According to Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), the dawn of systematic scientific thinking began in the sixth century B.C. in the Hellenic cities of Ionia in western Asia Minor. The times were those following the Homeric period (900-700 B.C.) when the eastern end of the Mediterranean was in great upheaval because of the invasion and destruction of the highly developed civilizations of Knossus, Mycenae, Pylas, and others. This era can be compared to that following the re-emergence that took place in Europe centuries later after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Ionian cities were prosperous and involved in wide-ranging commerce. Unfortunately little remains of their written texts from that period. What we have are commentaries by later writers, such as Aristotle, of the philosophical activities that began in Ionia. Even though we have only fragments of their work or hearsay reports concerning these pre-Socratic philosophers, enough of Greek philosophy of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. has been passed on so that various themes can be traced.
The first Ionian philosopher of whom anything is known was Thales (632-546 B.C.) of Miletus. He said that water is the fundamental substance and all things are derived from it. Exactly what he meant by this we do not know, as no written record by him remains. Aristotle is our authority on Thales and he seems uncertain himself as to Thales' meaning. We are left to guess and to surmise that what he was proposing was the concept of an a unity that permeates nature. What did Thales observe that lead him to propose such a startling idea? Was it an observation of the cycle of water falling as rain, collecting in rivers to run to the sea, there to evaporate forming clouds to fall again as rain? Or did he observe the intimate connection between biological processes in living matter and water? We shall probably never know for sure. But lacking evidence to the contrary, scholars are persuaded that the thoughts of Thales are as good as any in which to place the origin of science.
More is known of Anaximander (about 590 B.C.), a somewhat younger Milesian. In his writings, we find a fundamental theme found in later Greek thought. He imagines the cause of things not in a mystical or mythical way. Unlike Thales hypothesis that a fundamental substance like water is the source of unity in the physical world, Anaximander postulates that a featureless matrix, called "the Unlimited" or "the Infinite," is the source of physical existence by a separation of opposites. Exactly what he means by this we are not sure. Although his world system is not rooted in mechanism as we might argue today, neither is it rooted in mysticism as his predecessors contended. Its roots are in law: All natural processes, he wrote, are governed by an overriding principle of cosmic justice, or Necessity. By denying man's preferred status in nature, he asserts that things happen because they must, which was the first step on the road to scientific rationalism.
Why was science invented by the Greeks and not the Babylonians, the Egyptians, or any other peoples? Evidence to answer such a question has long since vanished, if it ever existed, and we can but speculate. We do know, however, that the Greeks, although bound by common cultural ties, were not organized into a single, rigid, monolithic state as were many other peoples at that time. Greece was a loose confederation of self-governing city-states. Besides science the Greeks gave the world both democracy and a language capable of expressing subtle distinctions in concepts. Thus the Greeks perceived not only a physical world operating under laws, but they conceived of a rule of law governing social order and incorporated that vision in to their very language. Whether one or the other of these three contributions--language, democracy, or science--lead to the others, or all three are by-products of some interaction or conditioning by their peculiar environment we can not say. But these three elements of what Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974), mathematician and science commentator, has called the ascent of man go hand-in-hand and tell us much about the mental and emotional outlook of the ancient Greeks.
Ptolemy's cosmological model lasted until Copernicus challenged it in the sixteenth century when he declared that the Earth is a planet and the Sun is the rightful occupant of the center of the Universe. Even then, however, Ptolemy's system did not totally disappear until the time of Newton in the late seventeenth century. But the belief that the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, and the planets must occupy the center of the Universe, since man is apparently the center of creation, did not completely disappear until the beginning of our own century, almost 350 years after Copernicus's death.
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