SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE !
Part 2: The Origin of Science
In order to grasp the truth and essence of any object or phenomena it is necessary to know the cause of its coming into being and to discover the law of its motion. The origin and history of science must therefore be known if we wish to exercise full social control over it. Science became a fully determinate phenomena in the 17th. century when it acquired an adequate form of mathematics to serve as its own language and in consequence became conscious of itself. Its origin is to be found far back in time.
It is estimated that man, the tool making animal, began making stone tools as long ago as two million years. In an unfinished essay entitled The Part Played by Labour in the Transition From Ape to Man, Engels traces through this formative period of human history in terms of the development of the human hand in the process of tool-making, and with that the development of consciousness which is the result of conclusions drawn directly from practice. He says:-
“Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source – next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that labour created man himself.”
The many examples of stone age tools now available for study, particularly the later ones, reveal a complicated manufacturing process which passes through various prepatory stages to final completion. It is clear from this that thousands of years of experience through trial and error gave rise to a leap in human consciousness, from work carried out more or less randomly to work based on a sophisticated pre-conceived plan. Further, this theory and practice must have had a social basis, since knowledge and skill must have been passed from generation to generation and there is evidence of a division of labour and a trade in stone implements.
Can such a social practice be regarded as science? If so it was an extremely poor kind of science since progress was painfully slow and limited in extent. Rather, it must be regarded as the precursor of science, not science as such, but mere technique, made necessary by the struggle to survive and to extend control over nature. Improved technique brings improved productivity which in turn brings social change. The leap from the practice of food gathering to the systematic production of food gave rise to civilisation for which a permanent surplus of food is necessary. The crucial period of technical advance which gave rise to the civilisations located on the Nile and the Euphrates was roughly from 6000 to 4000 B.C. Here great cities arose which brought new opportunities for co-operation and sharing of knowledge.
The earliest written records in existence are Babylonian baked clay tablets, dating from about 3000 B.C. From these we know that the Babylonians practiced astronomy and mathematics including rudimentary trigonometry. By 2000 B.C. they had a written system of law. Egyptian records have not survived so well because they were written in ink on papyrus, but their achievements went far beyond those of the Babylonians. At the beginning of the age of construction of the great pyramids, 3000 to 2500 B.C., they already had an alphabet and were engaged in agriculture, ship-building, weaving, and pottery and glass-making. Artefacts made from bronze, an alloy of tin and copper, have a consistent proportion of 12% tin to 88% copper which gives maximum hardness within an acceptable limit of brittleness and they tempered the metal to suit various purposes. They also had their astronomy and mathematics.
Clearly by this time technique had developed to the point where consciousness had reached a level at which labour, now carried out in a social way, had brought into being a theory of labour, a body of knowledge of the various skills, branches of labour, which had been recorded in written form including the beginnings of mathematics. This was a great step towards science, but not yet science in the proper sense, since all such knowledge was derived empirically, prompted by the need to solve a particular practical problem. The Babylonians had a curious system of numbers. For numbers from 1 to 50 they used a decimal system and for greater numbers a hexadecimal system. The only explanation for this is that it met the needs of some practical problem, but for theoretical, deductive mathematics it was totally inadequate. A highly organised society is impossible without a calendar. The first we know of was invented by the Egyptians in 4236 B.C., but to do it they had to study the heavens, hence astronomy.
All these were great achievements, but the transition from mere technique to science in the full sense was prevented by the social conditions of the day. In Egypt the manufacturing system was the property of the king and the work was carried out under the strict supervision of the cast of priests. The workers were serfs or slaves. When written records began to appear in the fourth millennium B.C. they first served the administrative needs of the ruling class. All the accumulated wisdom which had resulted from practical necessity was quickly transformed into a religious dogma which served the needs of class rule, and the priests kept the people in ignorance the better to maintain their power. In this way a political wall came into being between social practice and social theory and little further progress was made in Egypt, but the scene was set for the great achievements of the Greeks.
During the course of its history Greek culture extended throughout the eastern Mediterranean and even into Italy, and its beginning can be traced to the island of Ionia on the Aegean coast. Here political conditions were very different to those of Egypt. Power was in the hands of a mercantile aristocracy which had acquired the wisdom of the earlier civilisations and the interests of this class were best served by the rapid extension of technique and knowledge of every kind. In this new dawn man was becoming less a victim of the whim of the gods and more conscious of his power to shape his own destiny. This new outlook was reflected in early epic poetry such as Homer’s Iliad which is thought to have been composed as early as the ninth century B.C. in Ionia. The characters depicted in the Iliad still had their gods, but the events described spring in large measure from the actions of men.
This humanist trend was present at the very beginning of the Greek progress towards science. The gods were more in the nature of mythical super-men and they were not seriously credited with having created the world. The first recorded theory of the cosmos is that advanced by Thales who lived in the commercial city of Miletus on the Black Sea in the 6th. century B.C. He saw water as the universal substance from which everything sprang. The Earth was a flat disk floating on water, and the heavenly bodies were water vapour in a state of incandescence. Anaximander, (610-546 B.C.), who also lived in Miletus, elaborated on this. He thought the world had been formed from four elements, earth, water, fire and mist, and that since these could be transformed into each other they must consist of some common indeterminate substance. He also postulated that all life originated in the sea and that man had evolved from fish. Whereas Anaximander had taken water as the most fundamental of the four elements, Heraclitus took fire, perhaps because fire is responsible for observable transformations in nature, such as the turning of water to steam. He introduced the concept of tension, that is, a force tending to transform earth into fire, and an opposite tension tending to transform fire into earth. In his conception the existence of things in a stable state, Being, was due to a temporary balance of these forces, but one must inevitably overcome the other to produce change, which accounts for the coming into being and passing away of things in time. “All is flux”, Heraclitus famously said.
Other more elaborate theories were to follow, but the important thing is that all these theories were born out of observable facts and that it was considered that all life was the result of natural processes, that is, they were materialistic. Secondly, with Heraclitus we have the beginning of dialectical thought, the understanding that all existence is a conflict of opposites containing contradiction which is the driving force of all motion and change. The essence of this kind of thinking is the conviction that behind observable things and processes there lays a deeper truth which is itself not present to the senses. As Hegel puts it:-
“The truth of Being is Essence. Being is the immediate. Knowing seeks to understand that truth which Being, in and for itself, is, and therefore does not halt at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates through it, assuming that behind this Being there is something other than Being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being.” (Science of Logic.)
Under the influence of a thriving economy and international trade the natural philosophy of the Greeks, the speculative interpretation of the natural world, developed rapidly in unity with technique. Among the inventions credited to the Greeks are the potter’s wheel, the lathe, the bellows, the level, the square, the rule, and even solder.
All this enriched experience and empirical knowledge and gave rise to the increasing need for logical interpretation. “The eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men”, says Heraclitus, “if the mind cannot interpret what they say.” And he adds, “Of all the discourses I have heard there is not one who attains to the understanding that wisdom is apart from things.” Now once this distinction is made, between empirical knowledge derived from direct experience and the kind of knowledge which is derived from the logical analysis of experience the question of the relation between the two arises, and with that, which is primary and which relative, which is cause and which effect.
Empedocles took the materialist view that the world exists independently of our senses and that “wisdom” consisted of deeper knowledge of things, saying, “Go to, now, consider with all thy senses each thing in the way in which it is clear . . . do not withhold thy confidence from any other bodily part by which there is an opening for understanding, but consider everything in the way in which it is clear.” Parmenides took the opposite, idealist view. “Turn your mind away from the path of enquiry. Let not the habit engrained by manifold experience force you along this path, to make an instrument of the blind eye, the echoing ear, and the tongue, but test by reason my contribution to the great debate.” Unlike Hereclitus, who said everything was in a state of perpetual change, Parmenides thought that nothing changed, that the entire universe was fixed and static, and that the changes we perceive are mind created illusions. The contradiction between these views reflected the main social condition of the time, the division of society into a wealthy ruling class of land owners and merchants, and a working class of serfs and slaves. It was in the interests of the ruling class to present the world as unchanging since that meant that social change was also impossible, while such change was clearly in the interests of the serfs and slaves.
Perhaps the most famous name in Greek history is that of Pythagoras, (572-500 B.C.). Every school student knows his famous theorem concerning the right-angled triangle. In about 530 B.C. he founded a centre of learning in the city of Croton, where the social structure was similar to that of Miletus, with a powerful and rising mercantile middle class, a land owning ruling class and a working class of peasants and serfs. Pythagoras was a member of the merchant middle class and concerned himself with political questions, and above all mathematics. In contradistinction to the Ionian tradition, the abstraction of theory from practice, the Pythagorians started from theory and reconstructed the physical world from thought. The result was the introduction of a philosophical trend quite alien to the materialism of the Ionians. The Pythagorian tradition was essentially religious and idealistic.
Their principal element was neither water nor fire, but number. For the Pythagorians, the absolutely pure and eternal truth that results from simple mathematical operations had mystical and moral significance which was seen as the secret of all existence. Upon such truth they constructed a fully religious system. “Consider”, says Philolaus in the fifth century B.C., “the effects of the nature of number according to the power that resides in the decad. It is all great, all powerful, all sufficing, the first principle and the guide in life of Gods, of heaven, of men.” What is most telling here is that actual power is ascribed to number, which is to suggest that number, which is abstract, is cause and the objective physical world is effect. For the Pythagorians thought determined Being, which is idealism and the opposite of the Ionian materialist view which took Being as cause and thought as effect.
The Pythagorians conceived of numbers as having physical existence, hence their points has magnitude and their lines and planes thickness, and they proceeded to construct the world according to a geometrical system based on points, lines and planes according to the minimum number of points necessary for their construction. A point corresponded to the number one, a line to two, a plane to three, (a triangle), and a solid to four, (a triangular pyramid). Other shapes were constructed with larger numbers. However, while their contribution to mathematics was of historic importance their mentally constructed world contained a fatal flaw which became evident when they attempted to calculate the length of the diagonal of a square by the familiar method. Taking the side of a square as equal to one, the sum of the squares of the two sides enclosing the right angle is two. The length of the diagonal which is the hypotenuse is therefore the square root of two. Their whole system of numbers was based on integers, but the square root of two is irrational, 1.414213 . . . It turned out that the world could not be constructed out of integers, (whole points), but was infinitely divisible.
This full blown crisis in the Pythagorian system was the cause, or at least an important cause, of a further leap in Greek thought. The conclusion drawn was that if the world is infinitely divisible then it must be comprised of particles of matter which were too small to measure, atoms. This first concept of the atom is mainly associated with the name of Democritus. He conceived that the universe consisted infinitely of atoms, which were identical in substance but differed in size, shape and arrangement. They were in infinite motion and their successive combinations in space and time accounted for the coming into Being and the passing away of things, but the atom itself was impenetrable, (indivisible), eternal and unchanging. This concept of the atom made necessary the concept of the void as the environment in which the atoms existed, and the void was said to be infinite and infinitely penetrable. Abstraction from these natural scientific concepts gives rise to the philosophical concepts of Being, Nothing, and Becoming. Being and Nothing are united in Becoming, the coming into Being and passing away of things.
Of course we now know that this mechanical separation of matter, (as substance), and space, (as the void), is not correct. Modern models of the universe agree that in this sense matter and space are inseparably connected and that space comes into being as the result of the motion of matter, and that the atom is divisible.
We can now see how far the Greeks carried natural scientific theory and speculative philosophy, but can we yet speak of science in the full sense? Science begins with observation which includes such things as measurement and proceeds to quantitative and qualitative judgments, that is, analysis and synthesis; the results of analysis must be synthesised into new natural scientific theories and philosophical concepts, and we have seen how brilliantly the Greeks succeeded in this respect. However science stands on three legs not two, and the last is practical experiment to test the correctness or otherwise of theory, that is, to establish the objectivity of truth. Did the Greeks go far enough in this direction and bring science into being in the full sense? They certainly did test theory by practical experiment, and the pioneers in this respect were the Hippocratic doctors. While the only possible test of a speculative theory of the cosmos was the consistency of its own internal logic, the test of a medical theory was its effect on the patient, and it was a matter of life or death. The Hippocratic doctors tested their theories on diet, medicines, simple physiotherapy etc. on their patients and drew conclusions from the results obtained. Anaxagoras tested theories on the nature of air by inflating bladders and subjecting them to compressive tests, and the Pythagorians researched the mathematical basis of the musical scale by experimenting with strings and reed pipes of differing length. It seems likely that such practice was carried out on a substantial scale, since experiments that failed are hardly likely to have left a trace in the records.
However, while science unfolded out of technique it can never transcend the limits of technique. Due to their limited technology the Greeks never developed instruments specially designed and constructed for the purpose of scientific experiment and they made little further progress. The results of the separate fields of enquiry were never united into a single socially available theory, never fully expressed in mathematics, the true language of science, and the brilliant promise of Greek wisdom had to wait for its fulfilment. It was not till the renaissance that improved technology made further real progress possible.
Terry Button