Physical Sciences and Physics

Abstract

The history of any discipline is always based on written texts. In this way, to restrict ourselves to texts of Antiquity, the history of the Jewish people is based on the books of the Old Testament, the history of the Persian Wars on the books by Herodotus and the history of the Peloponnesian War on the books by Thucydides. Even the history of the Trojan War is based on Homer’s written work, although this was based, in turn, on earlier oral traditions of the Greeks of Homer’s time. This rule, of course, cannot find an exemption in the history of physics. This is the main reason why the history of physics, and hence the evolution of concepts in this science, necessarily starts from the ancient Greeks. It is certain that other people of historical times were also involved in scientific activities, such as the Babylonians, who developed astronomy, and the Egyptians, who developed geometry. But their aim was to solve practical problems of their everyday life and not to understand nature and its laws. The geometry of the ancient Egyptians was developed for the purpose of redistributing land after the annual flooding of Nile, while Babylonian astronomy was limited to the simple recording of astronomical observations, with a few surviving examples of predictions of future events. Instead, the interpretation of nature and its laws, in both these nations, was the responsibility of priests and kings. In other words, the interpretation of nature for them was not a result of rational thinking; it was based on truth by revelation. The “truth” was revealed to rulers, nobles and priests, and accepted, without questioning, by the rest of the people. This truth was closely related to the religion of each nation.