Miletan Leucippus

Miletan Leucippus (flourished c. 475 BC) was an Ionian Greek, born sometime after 500 BC somewhere in western Turkey or the islands of Aegean Sea. He was the founder of the atomic doctrine of matter. That theory has had a wide influence in both ancient and modern times.

Early atomism is often viewed as a reaction to the views of the Eleatics. It has been associated with the aptitude towards the world known sometimes as ‘philosophic meterialism’.

Leucippus, the first scientist to develop a complete theory for a universe based on the existence of an infinite number of atoms. Leucippus influences generations of physicist and chemists in their search to understand the basic structure the infinitesimal particles of the universe.

Democritus, born c. 460 was his student. It is likely that Leucippus proposed the atomic theory in the decade 440 - 430, His principal work was called The Great World System.
Miletan Leucippus

Al-Kindi (801–873 CE)

Al-Kindi or Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī was a Muslim Arab philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physician and musician. He was known as Al-Kindus by Western world.

Al-Kindi began his education at either Kufah or Basra, and completed it at Baghdad the centers of culture of his day.

Both Kufah and Basra were places of intense and original intellectual activity by the tome of Al-Kindi’s birth; this activity centered on a number of disciplines indigenous to Islamic culture such as Arabic grammar, the explication of the Qur'an and the principles of law, all of which would have important consequences for philosophy.

He studied Fiqh and the new born discipline called, kalam, but it seems that he was more interested in science and philosophy, to which he unsecrated the rest of his life, especially after he went to Baghdad.

Al-Kindi learnt Greek, but certainly he mastered the syriac language from which he translated several works.

He became well known in the Abbasid capital as a scholar and physician, enjoyed the patronage of the caliphs al Ma’mun and al-Mu’tasim and was appointed tutor of the latter’s son Ahmad.

Al-Kindi wrote hundred of papers on Greek philosophy, science, ethics, cosmology, metaphysics and what is known today as psychology, from an Islamic perspective.

He is a major contributor to the introduction of Greek philosophy to the Muslim World, although he was not afraid to contradict the Greek thinkers if he believed it conflicted with Islamic teachings.

Al-Kindi died on 873 in Baghdad, Iraq.
Al-Kindi (801–873 CE)

The Antikythera Mechanism

The earliest known purely mechanical clock appears to have been discovered on a ship wreck.

Shortly before Easter of 1900 a party of Greek sponge fishers returned from their normal fishing grounds near Tunisia, they were driven off course by a gale and found shelter close to Kythera, near the barren island of Antikythera.

They discovered the device known as the Antikythera mechanism, when they explored the shallow rock shelves below them which they had dropped their anchored.

At a depth of 42 meters they found a 50 m long ship wreck containing a plainly visible pile of bronze and marble statues. The Antikythera Mechanism or mechanical computing clock device is the most complex instrument of antiquity.

Subsequent exploration of the underwater site, by explorer Jacques Cousteau, enabled scientist to date the remnants of a ship to 87 BC.

Further analysis of the Antikythera mechanism with more advanced technologies has provided several recent discoveries.

Close examination revealed the fragment of a heavily encrusted, corroded, geared device measuring around 33 cm high, 17 cm wide and 9 cm thick.

Constructed of bronze and originally contained within a wooden frame, the device was engraved with a copious text, which appears to be the device’s operating manual.

In 1950s, it was realized by the science historian Derek Price that these were parts of an astronomical computer: a kind of solar and lunar calendar. 

Scientists concluded that the device was able to predict lunar and solar eclipse based on Babylonian eclipse algorithms, as well as to display some of the planetary and lunar positions, and even had gears to simulate irregularities in the Moon’s motion.

The Antikythera Mechanism process ho sophisticated Greek technology was. It was possibly constructed the school of Posidonius on the island of Rhodes.
The Antikythera Mechanism

Ancient Greek science

It is certain that Greek science in its origin was dependent on traditions that came from more ancient civilizations, notably from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

For example, Herodotus was the first to suggest that the Greeks obtained their knowledge of astronomy for Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Although unified by language and shared heritage, Greek society was not a single politic entity but a collections of city states scattered around the Aegean Sea and the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Instead of a centralized kingdom, Greek civilization arose as a set of decentralized city-sates, and it retained its loosed structure until Alexander the Great unified Greece in the fourth century BC.

Its pre-imperial period, from 600 to 300 BC is known as the Hellenic era, while period following Alexander’s conquests has been designated as the Hellenistic.

The Greeks were a people who actively participated in the governance of the state and were accustomed to debate and discussion of matters of importance as part of the daily course of life.

The most remarkable of Hellenic science was the Greek invention of scientific theory – ‘natural philosophy’ or the philosophy of nature. Early Greek speculation on the cosmos and the disinterested Hellenic quest for abstract knowledge were unprecedented endeavors.

There are four main chronological divisions in the period of Greek science:
*Pre-Socratic period. From 600 BC until just before 400 BC
*Fourth century, the century of Plato and Aristotle and later the creation of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophies.
*Hellenistic period, 300 – 100 BC
*Greco-Roman period, from about 100 BC to AD 600.

The last period was the period that the Greek science which was to pass later to the Arabs and through them to the Latin West was epitomized, reorganized and subjected to extensive commentaries.

The most famous of the early Greek thinkers, can be called ‘philosophers’, that is who love and search for knowledge or wisdom.

Aristotle refers to the earliest of Pre-Socrates physicists, for they were the first who tried to explain phenomenon on natural rather than supernatural grounds.

Earthquakes, for example, which Homer and Hesiod attribute to the action of Poseidon, are explain by Thales as the rocking of the earth while it floated in the all encompassing waters of Oceanus.

Aristotle also told the world that when two objects of different weights were dropped from a height, the heaviest would hit the ground first.
Ancient Greek science