What could the ancient-Greek approach reveal, using our hindsight?

[stuartmacg]

I saw a post on Quora recently, about Epicurus and his argument for the existence of indivisible atoms. The logic was faulty sadly.

Could we, with modern knowledge of what there is, come up with ancient Greek style arguments - going from every day observations, without microscopes or telescopes etc., to demonstrate the existence of anything interesting that the Greeks could have come up with?

The only idea I have come up with so far is: - The replication of objects we call life could only happen if some rigid (but occasionally altering) template exists, presumably at a small scale, for each object type. "Thus" the only universe which can evolve life must have small rigid duplicated objects.

Well, I tried, your turn :-).

 

[walkeraj]

Central heating: 350 B.C. Given Greek proclivity to the creation of large spaces this is mind boggling.

 

[stuartmacg]

I saw a post on Quora recently, about Epicurus and his argument for the existence of indivisible atoms. The logic was faulty sadly.

Could we, with modern knowledge of what there is, come up with ancient Greek style arguments - going from every day observations, without microscopes or telescopes etc., to demonstrate the existence of anything interesting that the Greeks could have come up with?

The only idea I have come up with so far is: - The replication of objects we call life could only happen if some rigid (but occasionally altering) template exists, presumably at a small scale, for each object type. "Thus" the only universe which can evolve life must have small rigid duplicated objects.

Well, I tried, your turn :-).

The Greek reasons for atoms seem to be:

Gets difficult to cut up small things: ??

If you keep dividing up forever you get infinite bits, and somehow this implies infinite matter:??

Dodgy at best.

However they seemed to feel unlimited steps were unacceptable (e.g. Zeno), and thought everything should be made from a few “elements”.

This suggests they felt that the information in any small bit of the world should be limited - could not be infinite.

Taking that as a hypothesis, then : -

• atoms are needed to stop having infinite infinitesimal bits each with positions etc.
• “elements” or indeed sub atomic building blocks are desirable to limit the otherwise indefinite variability of stuff.
• you get an infinite sequence of positions of anything in motion, if you can (in theory) observe positions at infinitesimal time intervals. If you cannot do this, then you cannot estimate speed and time together to unlimited accuracy i.e. the Heisenberg uncertainty principle must appear at some scale.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Could we, with modern knowledge of what there is, come up with ancient Greek style arguments - going from every day observations, without microscopes or telescopes etc., to demonstrate the existence of anything interesting that the Greeks could have come up with?

You mean, could we disregard the scientific method and yet gain all its benefits?

No.

 

[gmax137]

Sitting quietly in the dark, using only your thoughts to deduce "how the world must be" is a lost cause, IMO.

 

[stuartmacg]

Only a bit of fun - to see how far you could plausibly get using their approach with hypotheses they could have come up with.
I expect other folk could come up with other schemes.
I enjoyed it anyway. Sorry if you are offended. I think it does no harm, can if fact be beneficial, to play with things.

 

[gmax137]

Sorry if you are offended.

Not me!