The Romans laid concrete two thousand years ago and built roads that still exist today. They used the porch and doors to build large, air-conditioned indoor buildings that looked like a real Olympian - and they were still around. And they are transporting thousands of tons of water using canals to keep the busy community dry. These old buildings? And still all around! But did the Romans come up with ideas about physics? Like why do arches support weight differently than right angled structures? Are they asking questions of proto-chemistry - that is, "what are things?" - such as what little things make up good concrete? No. Let's take a look at what the Romans did to establish the argument that, the warning of destruction, which continued: is there any sense in which you can explain why it is true, abstract? Or do you understand something you can do about it, or can you explain why? [Intro Music Plays] The Romans derived much of their knowledge from the Greeks.
From 323 to 31 BCE, geometry, physics, astronomy, and other fields of Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle spread throughout the Greek world. This "world" included parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe influenced by Greek thought due to Alexander's brief invasion. Alexandria, Egypt - the largest city in the seventies Alexander named after him - paid tribute to the Museum, or "house of musse." This was not a museum in the modern sense of the word but rather like a research university. In Pergamon, in what is now Turkey, the chiefs paid for a library, which was - wait - a very large collection of books. The centers lasted for centuries, attracting visitors from far and wide. Alas, at the same time as these Greeks supported the research, a nation in central Italy called the Romans continued to invade with great force… which also lasted for centuries. The Romans would continue to spread the ancient Greek thought: until we called their culture "Greeks and Romans." But natural philosophy in Greek and Roman times was far from ideal. Today, we remember the Romans for their ingenuity - or the ability to improve the real world system - not their deepest thoughts about why the world is like this.
Roman engineering is based on Greek engineering. To make sense of politics, and many politicians want the same thing: big cars and many ships. So the Greek and Roman leaders did what the heads of state did everywhere: they paid the wise men to make great weapons. In the ancient Mediterranean, the building project of a military machine was called a builder, or architect. Most of these "architects" were unknown and did not write down ideas. However, few of them have done so. Well-known architect Archimedes of Syracuse, he fought for the Greeks against the Romans. Archimedes is well-known today as a mathematician: he worked with a wide range of geometric evidence including a circle, and he pioneered infinitesimals and exponents. Archimedes also developed many useful crosses, including a water screw and a combined pulley. The water screw pumps the water by turning the screw inside the pipe. This was immediately helpful in watering. And the way to get the water up the stairs is just cool! Archimedes also designed various military equipment to kill the Romans who were trying to capture his hometown. He was so impressed that the Roman general ordered his soldiers to arrest him, not to kill him. But one very cold soldier became frustrated when Archimedes did not stop working on mathematical evidence.
In a sense, Archimedes proved to be so real that he discovered for himself and, figuratively speaking, the era of Greek science in general. Archimedes was interested in some of the natural philosophies that defined his machines, but for others the majority of the thinkers of his day, astronomy, physics, and mathematics were important for mysterious, religious reasons. Making weapons was a matter of political power. The skies where the rain fell was perfect and incomprehensible. Shipbuilding was an art, something learned by practice. It was not a matter of understanding the hydrodynamics, or the chemical properties of the wood that make it bendy and floaty. Aristotle came to understand the difference between the two types of information we still use today. He categorized the information as "useful" or "theoretical." Useful information was called technē, from which we get "technology." “Technology” until recently, historically, has been linked to the concept of “art” —that is, something you learn by doing, and you can see in the real world. Theoretical knowledge, on the other hand, was epistēmē - the root of our term epistemology, the study of knowledge.
Epistēmē is the kind of knowledge that we most closely associate with science. Science is invisible, represented by formulas. When scientific historians talk about the possibilities for what we do not know, they use the term "activist." One of the most influential thinkers working on epidemic questions d
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