Nature Philosophy

living in today's world of science and technology and seeing the fabulous culture that we've created for ourselves it's probably easy to look into the past and look with some pity or disdain at the ancients who saw the world through mythology there was you know simple superstitious primitives who imagine that gods and goddesses were controlling everything we certainly achieved a much greater more precise understanding of the nature of the workings of the world today but that doesn't mean that the ancient stories should just be summarily dismissed ancient myth ancient symbols the rituals the the the art that they created reflects an understanding of the world which is not always inaccurate we saw for example looking at Paleolithic carving the woman of laws l showed that they understood accurately that lunar cycles and minstrel cycles were intimately connected with each other and this knowledge was essential in being able to successfully reproduce our species we saw in the Mayan creation myth the other day that the Mayans understood accurately that of all the creatures of the jungle monkeys were our closest relatives so these stories record an understanding of the world in a pre scientific way but that doesn't mean that it was wrong or silly or superstitious so it's a very rich mental landscape that way on earth and studying myth but we do recognize a couple of critical limitations in understanding the world through stories in this way number one is that if you believe that everything in the world operates because of gods and goddesses who are controlling it that there are divine personalities behind the forces of nature then the only way to gain some measure of control over your life and security that things will go well is to try to get along with these personalities in nature and that's why ancient religious behavior was largely rooted in sacrificing to these gods doing things to appease them to keep them from being angry with you nowadays if you worry that you know there might be a lightning storm do you sacrifice a goat to Zeus so that it'll be happy and not strike you down no you have a very different approach and more reliable what and it may be that the ancients when they saw the stormcloudsgathering and saw it as the furrowed brows of Zeus they had a little warning that they could hide but you get much more warning today because you can just turn the super Doppler to and check the barometric pressure and look at warm and cool fronts moving around and the way we measure the behavior of the physical world enables us to have a much greater control and understanding of how it operates the other limitation is that while the ancients observations of the world which were cast into story form may very well have described with some degree of accuracy how things behaved they knew when the storm clouds gathered that Zeus was angry and lightning might strike you can't research it any further you can either accept that Zeus causes lightning you can reject the idea but you're never going to uncover a science of electromagnetism if you're just sacrificing goats to Zeus so while ancient mythology captured their direct observations of the world and put it in a form that they could pass down and make use of to some extent there's obvious limitations to it and these limitations begin to be surpassed when we go back about 26 centuries to the early 6th century BC to the pre classical Greek world the Greeks at this time are not an organized nation they'll almost never be that in the ancient world the Greek peoples though are a collection of folks who share the same religious beliefs in the same language but they live in individual little city-states all around the ancient eastern Mediterranean quick-and-dirty map of the eastern Mediterranean the Greek world our little cities like Athens and Sparta but it's also not just the Greek mainland that the Greeks have also settled along the coast of what they called Asia Minor you would call Western Turkey today in the islands in the Aegean Sea so all of this is the Greek world in it's on the western coast of what is today Turkey in the region of Asia Minor that an entirely new way of understanding the world was invented this is where philosophy is born the word philosophy means literally love of wisdom so philosophers are people who love wisdom they seek to understand the workings of the world around them not understand it in terms of divine forces that need to be propitiated these philosophers were the first to look at the world of nature and just wonder if they could understand how it works without recourse to supernatural powers we could just simply observe its mechanics and its operations and make a science out of it what we would call a science so philosophy is borne by people who are investigating nature and trying to understand it rationally and because nature was the first object of rational speculation we called them nature philosophers today we would call them scientists the first of these nature philosophers was named bailey's and he was from a town in Asia Minor called Meletis and if there is a birthday of philosophy and science it would be the 28th of may 585 BC from your reading do you remember what happened on the 28th of May 585 BC there was an eclipse of the Sun that freaked people out and said there's going to be a battle that day that they canceled exactly now eclipses of the Sun had happened before what was unique about this one Bailey's had predicted it ahead of time that it was going to happen typically when there's an eclipse of the Sun people take it as a bad omen that source of light and life and justice and civilization suddenly going dark in the middle of the day usually you know they think the king is gonna die or the crops will fail it's always bad news they never just decided to start happy hour early and they never see it as a good sign but this one because staleys was able to tell him ahead of time that it would happen what he demonstrated was that the Sun didn't go dark because the gods have gotten angry with our behavior and our thinking about punishment force the Sun went dark because the mechanics of the universe had simply rolled around and it was time for the earth to be separated from the Sun briefly by the moon in predicting it ahead of time Bailey showed that you can understand how the world works and if you can understand it rationally and disconnect yourself from the belief that angry gods and goddesses are doing it all to you you can stop being afraid of these forces because you understand them now and when fail ease does in the early 6th century and begin the process of developing our rational in what is today our modern understanding of the world 26 centuries ago now Bailey's ability to do this the astronomy that he studied in order to do it was not something he invented himself where do you think they Lee's must have gone to have learned about astronomy most likely Egypt he could have gone to Babylon and learned it there as well but Egypt was a whole lot closer was just due south of them in North Africa and by his time Egypt is already an ancient civilization it had been around for thousands of years and they'd had plenty of time to develop their own sciences and just imagining Egypt in your mind looking at its landscape what kind of Sciences what kinds of technology must they obviously be very good at they must be really good at architecture because they built those big pyramids that are still there and if you know anything about the pyramids you know that they're also good at something else that's astronomy the three Great Pyramids of Giza the Valley of the Kings aligned to the three stars in Orion's belt so they're able to line up these pyramids on almost a perfect north-south axis and have them correspond proportionally to the positions of these stars which for them were divine but they were able to understand and make use of this so the ancient Egyptians were very good at astronomy they were very good at architecture and they were also very good at geometry in fact they invented geometry and they gave it its name geometry has its origins in the aftermath of the annual Nile flooding the Nile River gently floods every year spreading out moisture and topsoil and it makes Lower Egypt which is excellent for farming the problem is that the Nile flood also washes away all the boundary lines between farmers fields so after the now floods recede before you can plan somebody's got to go out and remeasure all these fields and basically some surveying and that was the job of the priests and this was specialized knowledge that the Egyptian priests had and the name geometry is a reminder of the original function of doing it our root words here geo what does that mean like geology/geography means what earth geo means earth and metree implies measuring geometry is literally earth measuring the Egyptian priests were able to use basic geometry and survey accurately these fields they also kept this knowledge to themselves as you may well know knowledge is power right so if you're an Egyptian priest and you were kind of corrupt and willing to take a bribe how could you use your specialized knowledge of geometry to enrich yourself yeah somebody bribe you a little bit increase your fields a little bit who's gonna argue with you you're the only one who knows Jim country so the Egyptian priesthood had the road motivations for keeping this knowledge to themselves the Egyptians did not have mass education their own traditions go back to the earliest of the Egyptian scientists somebody who is credited with the invention of the pyramid itself of the builder of the first pyramid he's considered the founder of Egyptian medicine and basically of all the Egyptian math and sciences any somebody's name you've probably heard him before is the world's first scientist who is that Imhotep right mem does a terrible mummy movies are going in Baudette that's who they're referencing there I think I think they made up the stuff in the movies but the motive was a real person and designed the Step Pyramid for King Joseph in case thousands of years later in the time of Fey Lee's the the descendants of this intellectual tradition are now bunch of priests org jealously guarding this and for some way or another families was able to get amongst them and learn their Sciences since he was going to go back to Greece with it perhaps he just wasn't considered a threat and also he's from a wealthy family I'm sure he had to bribe his way in but any case talese was able to learn these basic sciences from the Egyptians and take them back to his hometown of Meletis which is about here and he begins teaching Egyptian Sciences to his fellow Greeks so Fela is is the beginning of an academic traditions Heaney does several things that are very important one he opens the first school in ancient Greece where anybody that had the financial wherewithal to attend could increase their education this isn't public school for the masses yet but at least it's a step beyond what the Egyptian priests had allowed more people are able to get educated to make use of an education secondly he teaches what he learns about geometry to his fellows not just in schools but to people that are merchants and shippers and so forth he teaches them the astronomy that allows them to navigate by the North Star better and things like this and more importantly Bailey's is the first person we know in history to teach mathematics as an abstract science abstract math now we've already encountered the word abstract in this class what does it mean to abstract something to take the essence of something and divorce it from the particular details like those Paleolithic fertility figurines seem to be abstract images of fertility itself okay abstract math means that you're looking at what are written down as individual tricks to solve particular problems and taking the mathematical essence of it and then you can see how it applies to other sorts of problems give you an example in Egypt Bailey's would have learned the classic trick for how to measure the height of a pyramid or any other building and it's the same technique that's used all through antiquity we find it in medieval manuscripts of Cathedral builders this is a standard technique you want to know the height of a pyramid you can't climb up to the top and you know drop a knotted rope down the middle of it you need some other way of getting at it so you would have learned this you take a stick that's one unit one cubit tall doesn't matter foot mile quatloos whatever and you kneel down in the eyeball it so that you're looking from the top of the stick to the top of the thing that you want to measure and once you've done this all you need to do is take a couple of measurements that are available to you and you can figure out the rest of it because this stick is one edge of a very small triangle that is also connected to what is conceptually a very large triangle and what is the nature of the relationship between those two triangles they're both right triangles but what are they in reference to each other notice how they all have the same angles this is both 90 degrees they both share this angle and so whatever this is is the same as that two triangles that have the same there are different sizes but have the same angles are similar triangles these are similar triangles and once you understand that you have similar triangles you can figure other stuff out if these all have the same angles that means the length these sides are all going to share proportions with each other so let's say that this is one unit tall and then you measure this and this is a are no four units wide and this is about five whatever your units are what we're trying to figure out is the height of the pyramid so what else do we have to now find out to then extrapolate the height of the pyramid I've got to figure out one of these sides that's the one that's under question we can't fly up here to view this one but we can walk our paces to the middle of the pyramid and measure this distance so let's say this distance is 400 so we have a 1 4 5 triangle here in a similar triangle of which this side is 400 if this side is 400 what must the height be 100 it's going to be proportionally the same as the smaller triangle so by sitting down there and just sketching out a small triangle and then taking one of these larger measurements you can do something kind of amazing you can extend your mind out and measure things from a distance that you can't do directly all right now back in my latest what good is this trick going to be they don't have pyramids to measure there but once Daley's is able to abstract the principle of the triangle from this particular little trick that the egyptians knew it was able to apply it to different sorts of problems they don't have pyramids my leaders but they do have a lot of shipping a lot of merchant ships going in and out and there are little eight holes and little islands and things that you need to avoid so it's important to be able to guide a ship and accurately to port so knowing how far out that ship is from the coast is a valuable thing to be able to figure out how do you figured out build a couple of towers from these two towers you take sightings each way lay a little stick here and establish two similar triangles and since you know this distance and you can easily measure this you can then extrapolate the distance from each of these two towers with Bailey's is done is taken the abstract principle of the triangle from this particular detailed trick with the stick and some and a pyramid lifted it up and applied it to a completely different thing and that is why thinking of math and abstract ways is so powerful the Egyptian priests may have understood this as well but you don't see that in their writings the Egyptian mathematical texts that we have basically are like a collection of word problems if you need to measure this take a stick this big and it just gives you a discrete solution to a discrete problem but you don't have a sense of the interrelatedness of mathematical theorems and how this is all a bunch of interconnected principles and that's what the Greeks are gonna start figuring out beginning with Bailey's continuing through Pythagoras and till finally we get to a later Greek named Euclid whose name is famous because he was able to take all the mathematical traditions from before his time and collate them all together show the interrelationships and show how a certain small set of principles you can start with that and then extrapolate all the more complex mathematical problems you clear the geometry was the standard textbook well it's still the standard textbook it's really not changed it's Euclidean geometry still completely valid for four centuries we talked about studying geometry is studying your Euclid and so this Greek tradition has turned out to be a very powerful one in the Western world so fail ease has opened the first school he has begun to think about and teach math as an abstract set of principles which is then going to able to enable them to enlarge those principles and find more of them and find more applications and then the third and final contribution that Bailey's makes Bailey's asks the first philosophical question and what is the first philosophical question does the world made out of what is the basic material of which the world is composed now the way that he would have phrased this question is like so what is the essence of being the capital B and what he means by this particular way of phrasing it relates to an insight that Phaleas has about the world bailey's essentially no wants to know what the material world is made of but as examines the material world he realizes that there's something kind of perplexing about the universe around him now this is the central idea that sparks natural philosophy that sparks science itself a central concept that we're still wrestling with today and that is this everything in the world around us everything that you experience trees birds dogs your hat a giraffe a house my shoe that desk everything it's temporary every single thing in the universe will come to an end at some point the butterfly lives a couple of weeks and then it dies humans live 7080 years we die tortoises and alligators can live 150 200 years almost then they die there are trees that have lived for thousands of years it'll eventually die a mountain will exist for eons but slowly the rains wash it away to the sea there is nothing at all there's not a single thing in the universe you can point to that will last forever so if every single thing in the universe is temporary how does the universe as a whole continue to exist why isn't the whole thing just falling apart by now the Greeks believed that the universe was eternal it had changed forms perhaps but that the basic stuff the basic matter of reality had always existed whether they were right or wrong about that doesn't concern us now but they believed that the universe endured and it was this weird paradox that an eternal universe could be composed of transient temporary things in the universe how does a collection of a million temporary things become this enduring permanent cosmos around us okay that conundrum that central paradox is what drives his early thinking and fail ease concludes that there must be something more to reality than what we see physically through our five senses everything we perceive everything we hear see touch they smell we know comes to an end but in our mind we understand that things continue to endure somehow and so the first scientific theory the very first step towards a rational analysis of the world around us was to separate the world into two realms which he calls the realm of being in the realm of becoming both with definite ease these are formal philosophical terms the realm of becoming is the physical world around us and it has the qualities of being imperfect of being transient temporary and how do we perceive the physical world around us there are five senses but we know that there must be more to reality than that to account for the endurance of the universe and so he speculates that there's this invisible higher realm or deeper realm that there's a reality behind the physical world of appearances and none of our senses can perceive it directly but a rational minds comprehend that it must exist to account for the implausibility of the universe continuing when everything in it is temporary this realm of being is a abstract realm it is the realm of perfection it is the realm that is permanent therefore accounts for the permanence of the universe and we only perceive this world through rational thought we understand that it exists and so his first question is what is this essential primary element that is the substructure of the physical world that we perceive what is the real essence of the universe itself andthey Lee's answer to the question his answer to his first scientific theorizing water bailey's decides that perhaps water is the primary material of existence or maybe more accurately we should say the principle of moisture that's pretty reasonable guess Bailey's lived in a world surrounded by water we know that water is the primary requisite for life you go weeks and weeks without food if you had to but about three days without water you die rain water must come from the sky in order for crops to grow they understood something of the water cycle back then that rain becomes the rivers and evaporates becomes clouds they knew a little something about that in everything that's alive has moisture side and take any kind of animal and open it up and it's wet on the inside you are wet on the inside you can take a little seed will see that has the potential to grow into an entire tree and you crack open a seed and it's moist and sucked it seemed that families that everything has moisture at its basis so it's a pretty good insight now the importance of families is not so much the answer that he gives his theory of moisture as the primary material what's most important about Thalys is that he asked the question and he taught this way of thinking in this pleasure of enquiring rationally into the world to his students who then took up the Masters question and looked at it for themselves decided they weren't quite satisfied with his answers and came up with their own theories and then their students thought about it and speculated further and refined and came up with different theories after that what they Lee's really does is he began a conversation twenty six centuries ago he began asking what is the world made of how do we understand it how does it work in 26 centuries later after a lot of scientific revolutions and brushes with religious authorities and rocking back and forth we have slowly created this world that we live in today a world of which when you look around you don't see a single thing that's not man-made in the product of Science and Technology and most of what you know about the world are things you don't see directly you understand electromagnetism and gravity you understand the physics and the mathematics that lie behind how nature operates none of the stuff do you observe directly these are this is part of the invisible world that is in fact still real and that's what they Lee's began to explore what is behind the physical realm that we see with the senses that explains really how this world works and now we live in this amazing world where even in Florida on a hot late summer day we're all sitting very comfortably in this room nobody's sweating nobody's suffering in here because we have machines in the ceiling that control the speed at which invisible molecules are vibrating around you so that you'll be more comfortable the miracle that is air-conditioning and you will never get to air-conditioning much less rocket ships to the moon and all the other technology we enjoy if we continue to approach the world through religious stories it is only when you begin the process of trying to just rationally and dispassionately understand things that you begin to march towards the modern science and technology of our world so the conversation that families began has been going on in an unbroken tradition for 2600 years now and we're still trying to figure out what is the essential basis of reality we're still looking for it we haven't found it yet have we you know we get down to molecules and atoms and subatomic particles and electrons and we're still slamming subatomic particles together and finding all kinds of weird stuff that spills out of it we're still looking for that essential material and it's not so much that we must find that material but the process of looking for it has inspired so much of the science and technology that has made our lives so comfortable the way we live today is how the ancient Greeks imagined that the gods must live you have magic chariots without horses that whisk you to school we control the atmosphere around us we have machines that manufacture all of our things like little automatons slaves it's a miracle that we ever grew out of our earlier Paleolithic mythological world I have respect for that world but I'm glad we found another way of looking at nature now the theorists who came along after Thalys also suggested other theories the student of faily student was looking at the idea that water was the essence of everything and thought well that doesn't work for me because I mean how does water become fire I mean it's just too different how does it actually the process of it work and so in exhibit YZ came up with the idea maybe air was the fundamental substance because remember water is something you can see physically you know with your senses you can you know senses and we need something that's real but beyond sensory experience now the air around us it's real right can you see it not directly but how do you know it's real how do you know it's there I mean you're breathing it right there's something that's happening here you can see the effect of air when the wind is blowing on trees and so forth you see it indirectly the fact that there's air around us now between me and you is there a full continuum of air particles or is there just a few air particles flying around and avoid and we just need to breathe a couple of Amman to stay alive how do we know that there's a full continuity of air all through the atmosphere around us how do we prove that you just need a root beer and a straw put a straw and a root beer put your thumb over it pick it up and typically gravity is gonna make a fluid which is heavier than air fall downwards until it impacts something why does it stay in the straw when you do that why won't it come out well if the fluid did come out what would be left behind it if you're capping the top of it it would leave a void it would leave empty space a vacuum it's now a common element of science that nature abhors a vacuum there's something in all this space it seemed to get beyond the atmosphere in outer space but in exhibit YZ was able to demonstrate this by observing well housewives watering their gardens and they use something called a water thief to do it a water thief is a little metal or terracotta item that looks exactly like a shower head it's hollow inside the little holes on the bottom and you immerse this in your water it fills up you put your thumb over the top you pick it the water stays in there you take it over to your vegetable garden lift it your water your garden for a simple little common household device in the ancient world but Bailey is observing this realizes that this is giving him an insight to clue into the nature of the invisible stuff in the world around us the air so he decides that perhaps air is the basic element and he also comes up with a theory of physics theory essentially of how the process of how this particle becomes other things through condensation and rarefaction which is a fancy way of saying through heating or cooling so he thought that air particles when you heat them up and agitate them they become fire and if you cool them they become fog and mist and then water and then ice and then Harden and then become solid objects so through heating and cooling air becomes the things we see in the world around us now he could have actually tested this theory because obviously this is not what the world is made of and he might have been able to test this how could you test the idea that when matter cools it condenses and disprove that and what happened okay so take your root beer again Oh an unopened but in the freezer outside in the winter and what happens when it freezes actually expands doesn't it so if he'd done an experiment like that he could have realized that there was a problem with his theory but you'll find that that's the one thing that the ancients did not do they tended these philosophers observed the workings of nature and they theorized and try to come up with rational explanations but ultimately they never tested their theories that's gonna have to wait till modern science and the time of Galileo and the Scientific Revolution for that to become a standard principle of science that's the one thing missing from ancient science that distinguishes it from our modern science and the reasons seem to have been meant and they must have thought they would sort of muck up the works you know you don't want to fiddle with it you want to watch how nature operates and try to extrapolate the principles of its behavior rather than you know laying your hand in and messing it all up so that part is gonna be missing anyway the followers that continue are going to come up with other theories maybe earth is the basic substance it's the most abundant thing around this we live on it maybe the earth gives rise to the things of experience and then one ancient philosopher a really weird guy named Heraclitus have this other odd theories it's almost sort of zen-like and Heraclitus thought that the only thing in the world that is permanent is change itself ironically Heraclitus theorized that there was this kind of central cauldron of constant changeable energy this flux always in a state of motion fire was the simplest way of seeing this energy because fire is obviously a real thing but it's always changing right you can't freeze it or put it in a box or in your pocket it's this constant activity now remember for him fire was a basic substance and so he's often their eyes of that female fire is the basic element but what he really means is that there is this potential energy that becomes the solid objects of our sense experience and then after a while becomes this central flux energy once again and he also theorized that the total amount of things and flux always remains the same it's just changing form back and forth and so he intuitively comes up with a principle of modern physics any science majors out there know what I'm referring to the principle of the conservation of matter and energy the matter becomes energy energy becomes matter but the total amount stays the same it's just essential elements that are changing form and that was the original insight of the nature philosophers so whatever their theory was whatever these elements they thought might have been the essence the important thing is that they were exploring asking the questions and began to try to understand and and solve this paradox of the world how does a world full of temporary transient things add up to a permanent universe because the objects have since experienced might be temporary but behind it lays this essential eternal material that's just changing form whatever it is it coalesced this together and becomes tables and hats and dogs and Wolverines and giraffes and mountains and schools and houses and we form it into things and after a while they dissolve back into its basic material only to be reformed later into different objects of sense experience so the essential material is what's eternal this accounts for the Eternity of the universe the individual things it becomes can then come and go pass in and out of existence without the universe itself coming to an end now the ancients who are theorizing here are giving theories that each have some kind of an appeal and probably have flaws in them as well but one came along that became the most influential scientific theory of antiquity and it came from a guy named empedocles who had this aha moment as he's looking at the theories of earlier philosophers and it suddenly occurs to him that why do we assume that there's just one basic substance why can't there be several things that could been combined together in different quantities and become the things of sense experience and you might already see where this is going empedocles decided that there was not one basic element of the universe but that there were four elements and what are those four elements earth air fire and water so we sometimes call this a compromise theory he essentially combines earlier insights and comes up with a theory that a lot of the ancients the majority of them found to be a satisfactory explanation for the nature of the world around us there's four basic elements that combine together in different proportions and in different configurations to become the things that we experience around us so when you're looking at say a tree the hard bark in the wood is the earthy substance in it the the little crevices and the cells and the cavity walls are the Airy substance in it the sap that's going up the tree the moisture inside is the watery element and the living energy of it is the fire element and if you can combine elements together and make things it also ultimately holds out the possibility that maybe we can do this ourselves that we can combine elements together and actually make things and replicate the works of nature you know the the original insight that would lead you know centuries later to the Frankenstein novel a basically combining the forces of nature and making life originally this has its origins back in impact oh please his theory of the four elements became the standard scientific explanation for the world for over 2,000 years from his time around the fifth century BC up until about the 1730 18th century about 22 centuries anybody in the Western world who went to school and got educated learned that the world was made of these four elements and while today we've gone beyond this science and have a very different explanation for the physical world around us it is important when you're studying history and literature the humanities to realize that most of the people you study most of the people in history that left some writings behind that we still look at today which means they were educated saw the world like this when you're studying Leonardo da Vinci you're gonna realize that his science is based on a belief that the world is configured in this way financial art reflecting this when you're reading Shakespeare and in The Tempest they describe the warring of the elements as a way of referring to the storms up in the sky when he uses the phrase the warring of the elements he means these four elements colliding with each other in the upper atmosphere causing the resulting rain and lightning and wind that you see when hailstone Falls now some of it's becoming more earthy like and so you'll get an insight on Shakespeare and on most of the people you know up until about three hundred years ago when you realize that their education their whole worldview was based on something much different now one more elements going to get added to this later Plato we're going to talk about next week his very last work was a long scientific treatise in which he tried to combine all the science that he knew of his day and put it in to a coherent system and it became very influential simply because it survived antiquity was known through the Middle Ages it was the only play tonic dialogue that medieval scholars had to look at until the Italian Renaissance when they when all the rest of them were rediscovered but Plato took the theory of impede oakley's and thought there's got to be one more element we need to add here because while this very nicely accounts for the changing world of the senses around us what about the heavens the Stars and the upper cosmos which changes position that moves around us but they never seem to die out now we know that stars do eventually die out today but Plato didn't know that and those stars and these heavenly bodies seemed to be eternal it seemed to be this elegant higher level of reality in the cosmos above them and so this reality also must have some basic substance that's unique that's different from these things and Plato decided therefore that there was a fifth element a special element of which the heavens were composed which he calls ether ether so really it becomes the theory of the five elements and anybody that went to school for over two thousand years learned that this world is made out of earth air fire and water combining in different proportions but the heavens were ethereal they change position that they're eternal and never die out this gives us some cool vocabulary words we still have today if I say that that music you're listening to is ethereal what am I saying about it that it's heavenly that it's mystical do you youngsters still listened to Pink Floyd I would call that very ethereal music right Mazzy Star perhaps 90s lost you there so the word ethereal in another word another way of saying 5th element the Latin word for five is Quinn and another word for element is essence we've been asking what is the essence of being so this fifth element gives us this word which called quintessence if I say that that poem you wrote is the quintessence of style what am I saying about it it's the very highest it's at the very highest order that there's something timeless and classic about that poem you wrote Pink Floyd is the quintessence of good seventies music yes all right so words like ethereal and quintessential words that if you have a rich vocabulary you might still employ today are rooted literally in ancient science that is lost to us so there is still something valuable in knowing these discarded theories of science because they had such a long time to be a shaping influence on Western culture now there's another ancient philosopher that took a completely different tack on this name was Democritus and Democritus and his teacher Leucippus had a different way of looking at what the basic reality might be now borrow a piece of paper from you my borrow I mean half because I'm not giving it back thank you Democritus thought look all of these theories sound great maybe it's water maybe it's you know this or that but ultimately really if you want to get out what is the basic building block of matter or not just have some theoretical construct in your mind you got to get your hands a little bit dirty so just take and take anything rip it in half rip that in half that's that in half and keep cutting it in half and cutting it in half and cutting it and cutting in and cutting in and cutting it and cutting it and cutting it and putting it until you get something so tiny you can't cut it anymore the Greek word for a cut is told so I've been sitting here going oh and when I finally get a particle so tiny that I can't pull it any more then I have the negation of a cuttable bit I have something that is a told the atom atomic theory was devised by these ancient philosophers as well they don't know exactly the structure of the atom the way you know it today of course but they believe that there must be simply tiny little particles so fine that they cannot be seen that then combined together in different ways to make our structures the atomists were the closest to modern science in antiquity though very few people were atomists almost everybody that was educated believed with impede oh please that the four elements constructed the world down here so this was a very minority theory but it did survive there's a few scraps and writings and references and by the 18th century when the Scientific Revolution and the study of physics and chemistry had gotten to the point where the four elements just wasn't explaining things anymore there were just too many problems that it just could not explain then scientists went looking around for another whole model of thinking about the physical world and they rediscovered this concept of simply looking for the tiniest uncuttable bit and now we're in the age of telescopes and microscopes we've been able to extend our vision and so they begin using their microscopes and looking and looking and looking and trying to find them they discover cells and germs and bacteria and they keep looking and they keep looking and then finally with a very very powerful microscope they're able to just barely perceive this tiny little dot oh we've discovered the atom finally we have found it in 20th century physics has been the atomic age of trying to investigate the sub particles of the physical universe now this atom that they found is it really an uncuttable bit of matter no the atom is really a poorly named thing they thought that they had found it and it became the name and we're kind of stuck with the term now but when they're able to look at it closer and closer and closer they realize wait a minute there's a whole bunch of stuff in here all these little electrons and protons and neutrons and particles and stuff so is each of these an atom are these uncuttable bits of matter no you can cut those open and more stuff comes out we slam those together more stuff comes out as I said we're still really looking for the tiniest fundamental building block of reality we haven't found it yet and we now realize that we were a little hasty in calling this thing an atom nevertheless it's been the search itself that has had as its byproducts fabulous world that we live in today thanks to science and technology now all of this theorizing all of this speculation and investigation is basically about trying to understand things we can't see directly trying to make sense out of the invisible levels of reality that exists behind the surface level of appearances and that is the built-in problem with all of this because the only way we can even start to think about reality is to begin with our senses but our senses are not very reliable they give us limited and fragmented information basically this is you and we live in these flesh bags these bodies and we have five little peep holes with which we can peek out our five senses vision hearing taste touch smell but even the physical world that we experience are we really seeing at all we need to take a straw and you put it in a glass of water you look at it from the side it looks like it bends doesn't it is it actually bending and why do your eyes lie to you like that when you go to the beach look at the ocean what color is it say a clean beach sort of blue blue green okay scoop some of it up in your hands or color is it clear so what color is it really what do we even mean by that what I'm experiencing the redness of this hat is it because my eye is grasping something red no it's because the electromagnetic spectrum is hitting it and it's absorbing all the colors except the red what is being reflected back out at me so in a sense the redness is every color except red the red is the color being rejected by it do you remember in middle school when you learn about the electromagnetic spectrum nothing from x-rays to cosmic rays how much of that whole spectrum that comes down can you actually see tiny a little bit did that freak you out when you learn that it freaked me out to realize that all of this radiation was happening around me all the time and I can't see any of it except for this tiny little bit that we call visible light but there's gamma rays and cosmic rays and x-rays happening all around you right now you see a tiny little spectrum and that's it if you had if we devolve different kinds of eyes maybe we were like the predator we would see heat patterns we'd see that level of the spectrum but we see what we see can you hear everything going on around you no all right your dog can hear more things than you can his range is ability to hear pitch that is much higher than yours you ever been sitting in a quiet room and suddenly you hear ringing in your ears is there something actually ringing no do you ever do that experiment and some you know eighth-grade science-fair where your blindfold a person and you have them smell an onion and bite into an apple and they'll swear they just bit into an onion one sense can fool your other senses so what we get in this little flesh bag that we live in through the five little people by which we can look out our little bits of fragmented information which are often contradictory and unreliable how can we know anything about the world at all given the limitations on what we're actually able to perceive the only way is because inside our heads our brains is this rational mind what we call rational thought in the ability to recognize patterns to come upon questions and paradoxes to see discrepancies and the ability to try to investigate and find solutions to them the rational mind is able to process this limited information and create models patterns that enable us to understand the world these patterns we call science scientific theories they are not necessarily the truth about the world though they're simply a model that helps us understand how nature behaves for example do atoms actually look like this science majors know what's wrong with this Neil Bohr of the atom this is like an 80 year old 90 year old conception of the atom what's wrong with it what's inaccurate about it hmm it's two-dimensional for one thing are their ratios and proportions the sizes about right no even enlarge this big each of these neutrons of protons to be too tiny to see you'd have to enlarge this and to the size of a football stadium to be able to like a little grain of sand actually see those protons and neutrons most physical matter is made out of empty space in fact do these electrons move in these nice perfect circular orbits no you know that they move in this strange electron cloud and you can know where they are or how fast they're going but not both at the same time for some freaky reason so really this is a simplistic model that we have far outgrown and it's certainly not really an uncuttable they don't matter so why don't we still teach this to our kids so is saying that Zeus throws the lightning bolt that's inception alii z2 what's the usefulness of this model still what practical use does it still have for us even though we know that it's not truthful and accurate and what it depicts it helps you visualize it but you could just visualize Zeus throwing lightning bolts there's a reason we still teach this there's something valuable that you can do with this what can you conceptualize better by having this model in your mind you see the particles the components of the atom even though they're not really arranged in this quite this way when you think about molecules atoms bonded together into complex molecular bonds how do these atoms bond together by sharing electrons exactly so without this model in your mind trying to imagine you know molecular compounds and what electrons are sharing would be very difficult to wrap your head around at all and you can't see any of this directly but we know that that's in fact how it works did you all have chemistry class we had to balance chemical equations as hard I know I hard for me to imagine trying to balance a chemical equation without even having this model at all in your head it'd be almost impossible so these models don't actually give us the truth about what nature looks like but they are still useful because they help our limited rational minds contemplate the invisible aspects of reality without models like that you'd have a most impossible time even thinking about forces of gravity and electromagnetism and things like that so as you go through your science classes I want you to keep this in mind take this from humanity's into science with you that the science that you study is not the truth about the world science is a series of models that enables you to think about things you can't perceive directly with your senses and it it's the updating of the models that refining the improving of these models making them better able to allow us to predict how nature behaves that their real value lies the four elements theory of impede oh please was good science for over two thousand years it helped us understand how nature behaved and when we got to a sophisticated enough level we then moved on to another model that's what a scientific revolution is when you adopt a new model that helps you better understand how the world around you works thousand years from now this might seem like primitive superstition will have advanced our models so much further and have such a much more precise understanding wonder how do people believe such things so it's important to keep that in mind that keeps us humble as we investigate the great mysteries of the world around us alright next time we have one more philosopher to discuss and is the only one among these nature philosophers whose name you recognized when you were doing the reading what was the only familiar name to you Pythagoras and what do you know about Pythagoras that theorem exactly we'll talk about that Pythagorean theorem a little bit but it's not what's really important about them by the way how many of you hate math raise your hand you should love math and after you talk about Pythagoras hopefully you'll see why math is really an amazing thing you should embrace

Channel: George Brooks

Views: 21,189

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: Brooks, Valencia, Humanities, Nature Philosophy

Id: Og75s9ZzQrc

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2016