Talk:History of science in Classical Antiquity
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is part of the History of Science WikiProject, an attempt to improve and organize the history of science content on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. You can also help with the History of Science Collaboration of the Month. |
| B | This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale. |
| Top | This article has been rated as Top-importance on the importance scale. |
The theory of refraction attributed to Plato does not appear in his Timaeus, nor is it attributed to Plato in the mainstream literature on the history of optics. The account seems to fit the experiment described by Ptolemy in his optics, and most accounts see it as a case of typical Ptolemaic "data smoothing," in which measured data is smoothed in terms of Ptolemy's prior assumptions about the bending of light. This section (and the independent article on Plato's Theory of Refraction) should be deleted -- or retitled as "Ptolemy's theory of refraction" and revised to reflect the historical literature on Ptolemy.--SteveMcCluskey 00:07, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Is the term Pre-experimental science valid?
I was reading G.E.R. Lloyd's Early Greek Science... and came across a passage (pp. 139-142) where he spells out the uses and limits of experiments in the Greek "inquiry concerning nature" from the Pythagoreans to Ptolemy. In a nutshell, he documents enough experiments to demonstrate that the whole term Pre-experimental science is invalid -- or at the very least, expresses a particular point of view which has been seriously called into question.
I'd like some suggestions on how this article might be restructured to take better account of the complex nature of early Western scientific activity. My preference would be to shift the title from Pre-experimental science to Greek and Roman science, but that runs into the existing section on Greek and Hellenistic science in the article on History of science in early cultures. Any other ideas would be welcome. --SteveMcCluskey 01:20, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Major edit in Progress
I've changed the title of this section and am in the process of making a major edit in my user space. I'll return the revised version to this page shortly. --SteveMcCluskey 19:13, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
- The working version is now back in article space; I'm erasing the draft from my user space. --SteveMcCluskey 17:57, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
