Physics science book professional#

This tradition was revived and reinvigorated in Europe in the late middle ages, reaching a climax two centuries later in the works of Kepler, Huygens, and, above all, of Newton.

Physics science book professional#

It is as if in some post-apocalyptic future, scholars would learn about the work of Newton and Einstein from surviving articles in Scientific American or New Scientist.Īfter the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, the professional tradition of mathematical physics and astronomy petered out in the remaining Greek half of the empire, though it survived in the lands of Islam. For instance, we know about the measurement of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes around 240BC not from his own writings, which are lost, but from the commentary of Cleomedes, writing several centuries later. Ironically, as writers they were so much more popular than professional scientists that in many cases it is their comments on scientific research rather than reports of the research itself that were copied and recopied, giving their books a chance to survive the collapse of the ancient world.

It was not long before writers called “commentators” began to try to fill this gap.

Looking over the surviving highly mathematical works of Aristarchus, Archimedes and Ptolemy, we can feel a twinge of sympathy for Greeks or Greek-speaking Romans who tried to keep up with the latest discoveries about light, fluids or the planets. But the indispensable use of mathematics by Hellenistic physicists and astronomers began to get in the way of communication between scientists and the public. Physical science began seriously to benefit from mathematics only after Aristotle’s death in 322BC, when the vital centre of science moved from Athens to Alexandria. He perceptively concluded from the appearance of the night sky at different latitudes that the Earth is a sphere, but he did not bother to use these observations (as could have been done) to calculate the size of our planet. The development of pure mathematics was already well under way in Aristotle’s day, but its use in science by Plato and the Pythagoreans had been childish, and Aristotle himself had little interest in the use of mathematics in science. It is mathematics above all that presents an obstacle to communication between professional scientists and the general educated public. This is not evidence so much of Aristotle’s skills as a writer, or of the excellence of Greek education, as it is of the primitive state of Hellenic physical science, which made no effective use of mathematics. All of his own writing, on physics and astronomy as well as on politics and aesthetics, was accessible to any educated Greek of his time. I f you had a chance to ask Aristotle what he thought of the idea of writing about physical science for general readers, he would not have understood what you meant.