Page 38 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Ideas & Inventions / Interview

PROFILE STEVEN WEINBERG
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Born in New York City in 1933, Weinberg began his career at the University TO MORE
of California, Berkeley before teaching at institutions including Harvard and FROM THIS
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in the field of theoretical INTERVIEW
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physics has won numerous awards, perhaps most notably the Nobel Prize in
/podcasts
Physics in 1979. He is currently a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
IN CONTEXT a moving platform – the Earth. But How far did the Middle Ages set the
The development
of scientific thought – broadly, the Copernicus made no significant observa- ground for the scientific revolution?
attempt to make sense of the physical tions of his own: he was relying on what The Middle Ages certainly provided an
universe – is generally understood Ptolemy had already done. There are many institutional framework in the form of the
to have undergone particularly rapid similar examples, too. great universities. Copernicus was educated
progress in two periods. The ancient However, while we refer to Isaac at universities in Italy; Galileo taught at
Greek world saw contributions from Newton’s work to explain the mechanics of Padua and was then a professor at Pisa,
figures including polymath Ptolemy, motion and gravity in physics courses although he didn’t teach; Newton was
while the developments of the 16th today, we don’t go back to the Greeks. They always associated with the University of
and 17th-century scientific revolution are part of our heritage, but their value was Cambridge. These universities were
were generated by thinkers including mostly in making the scientific revolution offshoots of the cathedral schools that had
physicists and mathematicians Isaac of the 16th and 17th centuries possible. begun a kind of intellectual revolution in
Newton and Galileo Galilei, astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus and philosopher the 11th century in Europe. They kept alive
and scientist René Descartes. Why were the ancient Greeks able to the idea of a rational universe governed by
produce so much important work? law, and in particular when the teachings of
Well, not all of them were. The period that Aristotle became firmly fixed in the
What inspired you to write this book? many people think of as the golden age of academic curriculum, the idea of a rational,
I had been teaching an undergraduate ancient Greece – the Hellenic period (the understandable world became dominant in
course in the history of physics and fifth and fourth centuries BC), when European thought.
astronomy for students who didn’t already Athens was at the centre of intellectual life But it wasn’t a scientific world. No one
know a lot about it. As I taught, I became – was not very productive, scientifically. in the Middle Ages really had anything
aware that things in the past were quite They made some qualitative advances (for approaching our modern conception of
different from what I had thought. It’s not example, the philosopher and scientist Aris- science, and they made very little progress
true to say that scientists were reaching for totle gave a nice argument for why the towards actual scientific knowledge. There
the same goals as us and that they were Earth is a sphere), but the detailed math- were arguments about the possible move-
simply not getting as close as we’ve come. ematical confrontation of theory and ment of the Earth, but in the end they
In fact, they really had no idea of the kind observation we associate with modern didn’t lead to anything like the Copernican
of things that can be learned about the physics and astronomy didn’t exist. That theory. The Middle Ages was not an
world and the way to learn it. And began in the Hellenistic period, when the intellectual desert, but it wasn’t a period
I began to see the history of science not as centre of Greek thought moved to Alexan- that resembles either the Hellenistic age
the accumulation of facts and theories, but dria, and the Greek city-states were that went before or the scientific revolution
as the learning of a way of interacting with absorbed into empires, first the Hellenistic that came afterwards.
nature that leads to reliable knowledge. kingdoms and then the Roman empire.
It’s surprised me how far the great natural I don’t know precisely why the change What was the contribution of Islamic
scientists of the past were from anything happened at that point. Greek thought in thinkers in this period?
like our modern conception of science. general took a less aristocratic tone, and After the decline of the Roman empire in
people who did science also began to be the west, science became, I would say,
Heading to the start of this story, how concerned with its practical application. ineffective and largely absent in the Greek
much do we owe the ancient Greeks? They also became much less religious: the half of the Roman empire. You find no
I think the people of the scientific revolu- religiosity you find in the work of Plato, scientific work – at least, I’m not aware of
tion owed them a tremendous amount, which is largely gone with Aristotle, seems any – during about 1,000 years of the
particularly the Greeks of the Hellenistic to be completely absent by the time you Byzantine empire. During that period,
(roughly the third, second and first get to the great Hellenistics leading up science was kept alive in the world of Islam,
centuries BC) and Roman periods. For to Ptolemy. first in the form of translations of the great
example, Copernicus did not base his accomplishments of the Greeks and in
theory of the Earth going around the Sun original work that built on and improved
on his own observations or those of his on what the Hellenistic and Roman Greeks
contemporaries in Europe, but on the The study of the had done.
earlier work of the Greeks, particularly Some of it was very impressive: I think of
history of science
Ptolemy. He saw that Ptolemy’s theory the work of al-Haytham in optics, who for
could be rectified and made understandable the first time understood why light is bent
by just changing the point of view from a is the best antidote when it goes, for example, from air into
stationary Earth to a stationary Sun with water. However, although Islamic science
the Earth orbiting it. The peculiarities of to the philosophy in one form or another continued for a few
Ptolemy’s theory were simply due to the centuries, its golden age was really pretty
fact that we observe the solar system from of science much over by 1100. If you list the great

38 The Story of Science & Technology