Читать книгу 2,637 Years of Physics from Thales of Miletos to the Modern Era - Sheldon Cohen - Страница 9

added other elements to the century long discussion by insisting that fire was the source of everything. His main thought was to suggest that it also had life as manifested by its ever-changing ability. It evolved from fuel to fire to smoke to clouds to rain to oceans to earth. Heraclitus stood for the thesis that there was a unity of the world, but it depended upon and was consistent with constant change of opposites such as heat and cold, day and night, and life and death. This change suggested equilibrium, and his contribution was to suggest that such equilibrium indicated orderliness in our world.

Heraclitus was considered the most influential Greek philosopher before Socrates. What this deep thinking did to his mind is open to conjecture, however, for he was said to have retreated into the forest where he lived on plants, and tried to cure the dropsy (leg swelling) which he developed by covering himself with manure. It didn’t work.

The problem for the ancient Greek philosophers was the difficulty in attempting to develop a theory of a single entity evolving into the great variety of objects in the world.

To reconcile this conundrum,