Science emerging can be seen into the light of historic day in the person of the Ionian Greek Thales.
Diogenes Laertius says that Ionian philosophy began with Anaximander but that Thales instructed Anaximander. Aristotle considered Thales to be ‘the first founder of this kind of philosophy, for example, the thought of those subject who sought to find what he called the ‘material cause ‘ of things.
Though he was the son of a Phoenician mother, Thales of Miletus was a citizen of the Ionian city of Miletus.
He was a founder of the Ionian school and was numbered among the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece in the pre-Socratic Era. Thales was an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher.
Thales established a heritage of searching for knowledge for knowledge’s sake, development of the scientific method, establishment of practical methods and application of a conjectural approach to question of natural phenomena.
As a young man, he traveled to Egypt and the Near East to study geometry, a branch of mathematics concerned with points, lines and surfaces in two dimensions.
In Mesopotamian he learned of the ‘Saronic cycle’ that is to say the interval of eighteen years and eleven days, a multiple of which the observation of ages by temple star-gazers had shown to be usual between eclipses of the sun. Knowledge of this enabled the shrewd travel to make a lucky forecast of the eclipse visible at Miletus in 585 BC.
It was Thales of Miletus, who was credited with the discovery of the electrostatic attraction. Thales noted that after amber was rubbed, straw was attracted to the piece of amber.
The Neo-Platonist philosopher Proclus, writing in the fifth century AD, says that Thales learned geometry from the Egyptian and brought the knowledge back to Greece. Thales was also supposed to be the first to prove various geometrical theorems and it was said that he used geometry to measure the heights of the pyramids in Egypt and the distance of ships at sea.
Thales of Miletus
