Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 77

The transition from early “natural philosophy” to what we now think of as hard science is largely a technological phenomenon that evolved alongside the development of tools that allowed for more precise measurement. The ancient Greeks and Chinese didn’t fail to develop Newton’s theory of gravity because they weren’t inherently intelligent enough. The Greeks are, after all, the same civilization that brought us Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes. They were smart enough. What they didn’t have, however, were precise clocks.

Even if they had been inclined to try to develop the sort of science that would later have taken shape during the Enlightenment a couple of millennia later, their theories wouldn’t have taken shape if they couldn’t properly quantify the measurements of what they were talking about. Without precise clocks, it was difficult to make accurate and exact measurements of the time associated with motion.

Within the area where they could measure things precisely, these ancient people did some great work. They used shadows and mathematics to calculate with a fair amount of accuracy the radius and circumference of Earth, for example. Their ability to measure length was more refined than their ability to measure time.

In a practical sense, one of the important things that science accomplishes is making precise and accurate measurements of quantities in the physical world. When people talk about a “scientific fact” that’s truly objective, they’re usually talking about this measurement aspect of science.

Changes in what can be measured, in turn, lead to changes in what can be talked about scientifically. The invention of devices such as the telescope, microscope, and particle accelerator has allowed for measurements and explorations of whole new realms of nature, turning things that had previously been beyond the reach of scientific inquiry into something that can be measured and, in turn, analyzed and better understood.