The Genesis of Science: The Story of Greek Imagination

Classicist Bertman (Doorway Through Time) examines the scientific legacy of ancient civilizations with an emphasis on Greece. Bertman catalogues an impressive set of Greek scientific firsts, and he does so by straightforwardly organizing the science into optics, acoustics, mechanics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, meteorology, psychology, and geography. There are many familiar names (Euclid, Pythagoras, Aristotle), with familiar stories attached; Archimedes’ “Eureka” moment is particularly well told. There are unfamiliar names, too: alchemist Maria the Jewess, who invented “perhaps the first still in history”; mapmaker Anaximander; and Eratosthenes, who around 200 B.C.E. calculated with surprising accuracy the polar circumference of the earth. Bertman explains the cultural reasons for the Greeks’ remarkable scientific accomplishments in a fairly cursory fashion as resting on their belief in an ordered universe, whose rules “can be discovered by the human mind,” and a “compulsion to see and understand....” He adds a deep belief in rationalism, humanism, and a desire to excel at all things as additional driving forces. Bertman is an unabashed admirer of the ancient Greeks, and his depiction of their scientific accomplishments gives readers a reason to share his admiration. Illus. (Oct.)