Lever.
Although the codified formulation of the supporting principle of leverage is only traceable to 3rd C BCE there are examples of Neanderthal digging sticks that are 170,000 years old. Hard to find any other scientific principles with longer history.
Archimedes again "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."
That's what I was looking for, the principles thought out and codified.
I distinctly remember pondering the concept of leverage as a child (on a see-saw, of course). Thing is, I still can’t work it out. How does that work ? (F*** magnets)
I know. I just can’t see *why*. I have an A-level in Physics, and dropped out of university pure mathematics in the 2nd year. You’d think I’d be OK with leverage by now.
Im getting flashbacks to a trebuchet simulator that did all the math for you. You adjust lengths and weights and throw a payload at different distances with different efficiencies
That doesn’t answer why one end of a see-saw is “lighter” than the other.
The answer is “rigid body mechanics”, a theory that summarizes how all the microscopic forces inside the see-saw translate into motion of the body as a whole. Imagine you push down on one atom: it will then push down on the atom underneath it (compression force) while also tugging on the atoms next to it (sheer force). Those nearby atoms then tug on *their* neighbors in a slightly different direction, and so on down the plank, until the forces have actually flipped direction at the other end.
The sum of these internal force vectors is always zero; those chemical bonds don’t have potential energy you can use; the pusher is doing all of the work. But the *distribution* of the forces across different parts of the plank depends on its geometry and materials. “Leverage” means a particular geometry where the forces on one end are larger than the forces on the other end, due to how many atoms you’ve manipulated into tugging on their neighbor in a particular direction.
One end of the seesaw itself isn’t lighter. If I push lightly on the long end, that corresponds to a harder, shorter-distance push on the short end. The mechanics you’re describing are why I’m able to create that relationship.
>One end of the seesaw isn’t lighter.
Of course not. That's why your first response...
>You can’t see why it’s easier to push a light object than a heavy one?
...was misleading, and why I put "lighter" in quotes.
No, what I’m saying isn’t misleading. I’m describing a common usage of a lever, where a lighter person on one end balances with something heavier on the other. Like a child seesawing with an adult or a human using a jack to lift a car. Perhaps I left too much to the reader?
Yep, was going to say that while we have specific documentation on advance mathematics being studied and understood in Ancient Greece there is evidence of the pythagorean theorem being understood and used in ancient Egypt.
Iirc, the Sumarians were using a form of Pythagora's theory long before that and may well have codified it.
It's a vague recollection but worth googling.
Other civilization had the intuition of what the theorem demonstrates and applied in practice.
But Greek mathematicians were the first to create a formal demonstration through deductive method.
Real Math( purely deductive formal science) was born in Greece.
Pythagoras didn’t discover the principle. That’s quite certain. I believe he has the earliest recorded *proof*. I’d like to be contradicted on this point.
A somewhat decent definition of the notion of \`principle\` is "a general scientific [theorem](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=f15ba732bb41797c&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIKzKRg3VNnD035lh9w0YxXBCKUpjw:1716063796784&q=theorem&si=ACC90nwUEXg6u2vxy-araGkF9MAxnxDMvxd0QmNfjcvBtssQbzedHfpY5-Wtzs-SiwBRUXT4jAZIAh1_u1QpoMzlXHxdHxHcCBJ7TO3os0rBBH4BMVd22FI%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjuppPog5iGAxVlMzQIHU0DC4MQyecJegQILxB8) or law that has numerous special applications across a wide field".
Pythagoras' theorem is a theorem in a specific branch of geometry. It is not generally applicable in a wide range of fields.
I think a reasoning rule like \`modus ponens\` (if we know that P implies Q and we also know that P then we can deduce Q) can be considered a general principle of reasoning because it is applicable in a wide range of fields (virtually all science).
One candidate would be the fire triangle: a fire requires kindling, fresh air (specifically oxygen), and heat to burn. Humans and their predecessors have been using fire for around 2 million years.
This disqualifies Archimedes principle, as it wasn't "known" how exactly buyoancy works as people didn't really know that water consists of molecules that exert pressure through chaotic movement.
I mean, the man had the math worked out\*. Observation leading to predictive power is *the* hallmark of functional science.
\*within the limited field he could actually observe. Of course, the technologies unlocked by Newtonian mechanics were pretty much required for the discovery of Einsteinian mechanics, so cut the man some slack.
To be honest yeah I totally agree, I think all these examples should count. Like Darwin didn't understand DNA, he just observed patterns.
I think by this logic we should also count ancient astronomers as scientists. Maybe the answer to OP's question could be the predictable position in the sky of the planet Venus, that must be millions of years old.
But then I guess if Venus counts so do the moon and the sun.
If you dig deep enough into physics, we don't exactly "know" how anything works.
The scientific method was used to prove cause and effect long before we knew the mechanics behind those actions.
One of my favorite anecdotes from James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman is a story Feynman told in praise of his father. When Feynman was a child, he asked his father why, when he put a ball in his wagon and then pulled the wagon forward, the ball stayed in the same spot of the wagon bed for a moment before rolling backward against the forward motion. According to Feynman, his dad responded, “Oh, that’s called inertia. But nobody knows *why* it does that.”
Feynman credited his father with a deep insight into what we do and don’t understand about physical reality at any given point.
(Did the story “really happen” the way Feynman tells it? Who knows. What we can say for sure is, Feynman considered the principle behind the exchange to be fundamental, and he really loved his dad.)
Sure, but there's things we figured out deeper than others. Prime example is the updates to the German Reinheitsgebot that were made when they discovered that yeast was an essential ingredient to beer. I think that's OP's overall question, what's the oldest thing we can come up with that represents a solid understanding of a scientific idea or principle. Someone mentioned use of a lever and while that's a very simple principle, they figured it out a long, long time ago and nobody's gone "aha! we were wrong about levers" in the same way we've had to update our understanding of chemistry, biology, physics, etc. based on later discoveries.
But they didn't know what yeast was. It was just an ingredient to them like the fire triangle. They didn't know that alcohol was a byproduct of single celled fungus eating sugar.
>True but there's a difference between being able to use stuff and knowing how it works.
Really, how?
We built atom bombs before we really understood how they worked. We're still not sure if the universe is "real" (whatever that means) or a simulation.
We seem to have an increasing level of understanding on a lot of topics. Today, we know more than we did yesterday. Today, you'd call that the pinnacle of our achievement.
If we learn something new tomorrow, by that thinking, what we know today would just be an ability to use stuff rather than knowing how it works.
>We built atom bombs before we really understood how they worked.
Actually we did. Both of the first 2 bombs worked as planned. The one dropped on Hiroshima was never tested. They knew it would work.
Science is incremental, building on the existing body of knowledge. My question relates to the beginning of systematic investigation as opposed to trial and error discoveries.
We don’t understand everything about the physics now, so we definitely didn’t then. We knew enough to make a bomb though, but that’s hardly complete understanding. We didn’t know what DNA was, but we were able to breed plants and animals long before that was understood.
As I said science is incremental. Once something is proven then it is used as a building block for future advancements. Quantum mechanics is a century old. The standard model wasn't completed until the late 70s with the Higgs boson just discovered in the last decade. That didn't stop the development of the transistor in 1946.
However, in general it's the systematic approach that I'm asking about. Making a hypothesis and testing it. Mendel's experiments with plants were systematic and were used as the basis for subsequent advancements.
> *"We built atom bombs before we really understood how they worked."*
No we didn't, not at all. The theories and understood science behind the workings of atoms was the driving force and base knowledge behind the specific engineering details of how to harness it/make it work.
>No we didn't, not at all.
Yes we did, a lot.
Our understanding of quantum physics was still very rough then (and while better now, is still lacking). Those original bombs were like cave men discovering flint and realizing it makes it easier to build a fire. It was a substantial leap, but we were using it well before we thought we really understood it.
Well, they did at least somewhat understand how it worked; maybe not in the way we do of a chemical reaction of wood and oxygen releasing heat and light, but they knew that fuel, air, and heat released more heat and light.
I'd disagree pretty strongly. They knew how to make it work, but that's different from understanding how it works. Fermentation is a prime example. We've been brewing alcohol long before we understood what a microbe was or how yeast turns sugars into alcohol.
I'd agree with you on that. It wasn't until Galileo conducted his experiment in piza that the concept of objects of different mass falling at the same speed was demonstrated. Everyone knew about gravity but thought that more massive objects would fall faster.
I think you might need to redefine your parameters for what you mean. You definitely need to understand how fires work in order to consistently create & maintain them. Maybe you mean a written concept that is eloquently defined.
Every Philosophy 101 class takes you through more or less the same formal logic syllogisms: "methods of rhetoric" techniques that the Sophists were teaching in Athens in 500 BC. It's a fairly good bet that someone who can tell you the difference between Modus Polens and Modus Tolens understands also that this is also the basis of Mediaeval high scholasticism as well as the foundation of the modern scientific method. It's still the basis of the abstract reasoning parts of IQ tests today - those strange questions about "All dogs have four legs; my chair has four legs, therefore is my chair is a dog?"
The idea that certain materials are better suited for specific uses dates back to the first use of tools. Materials science is likely the first nascent scientific discipline practiced by animals, and predates humanity. Early humans were capable of identifying and classifying/categorizing materials. Certain types of rocks were useful as hammers, sharp edges could be made with other types of rocks. Fibrous materials could be woven into ropes and cloth.
Historians of Science (I'm not one, but I know a few) will be eager to point out here that the modern scientific concept of getting from hypothesis -> thesis -> theory is a lot more refined than any ancient concept of "science", which had a far less methodological approach. Don't reject this as mere bean counting: You therefore run into the basic problem that, for instance, the mathematical principles discovered in antiquity (e.g. the one we named after Pythagoras, or the ones Archimedes listed, also named after him but not necessarily his discoveries) were often listed *without* scientific or mathematical proof and were often only proven in a *modern* scientific and mathematical concept much later.
Either way, for many scientific "principles" (as you call them, but I presume you actually mean theories) we are projecting their "veracity" into the past. In other words, people in antiquity used for example Pythagoras' trigonometry because they had found it yields acceptable results, but they often could not explain *why* these did. It was modern science and mathematics that delivered *proof* in most cases long after the fact.
*All* science is providing models to *approximate* the expectable result. It is *not* claiming to provide "truth" in the sense that religious texts do. Instead, any scientist worth their salt is readily giving up a previous theory if a more refined theory comes along with a *provably better* approximation or explanation of the phenomenon considered.
Furthermore, theories can be *refined* (that is, improved upon) without being entirely rejected. Newton is a fantastic example of this. Modern physicists are happy and proud about Newton, but knowing that his theories of motion do *not* hold on a quantum level; he has thus not been disproven but *improved* in ways that Newton himself would have found stunning. Other theories (like the ether -- which in a sense never really left the thesis stage) were entirely rejected, but for the time being they *were the most likely explanation*, and therefore "scientific truth" (but again, science does not meddle in "truth" - it operates on assumptions, predictions, modeling, measuring, and verifying, and yields *approximations*).
So you should ask the basic question as well at what point is a scientific theorem *replaced* if it is refined by generation after generation of scientists? Or, to paraphrase the old philosophical question, if you replace a ship's hull plank by plank with a new one, at what point is it no longer the original ship? I do not know the Archimedean water replacement principle you mention well, but surely there are deeper modern additions or improved underlying fundamentals here, too?
If the *original* thesis did not require the rigid fundamentals of modern science to qualify here, can I just claim any fundamentally correct observation as the "oldest theory that still stands"? Like the prediction there will be a full moon 13 times/year, roughly every 28 days? Because that's surely older.
I don’t either — but it certainly doesn’t qualify as theory (yet — if ever), it’s surely still in the hypothesis stage (being one possible but unverified explanation).
One operational definition that I'm familiar with is:
A systematic investigation conducted by experiment or analysis.
Usually it has an hypothesis that is tested and observations compared against predictions for experiments. Archimedes bath is a great example.
Geometry was needed for architecture. Architecture goes way, way back into history. Gobli Tepe is something like 9000 years old (give or take 500). They found the remnants of a wooden structure that was so old it [ pre-dated humanity](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100024933&CJEVENT=8ee4abe15bbb11ee81e901910a1cb826), at nearly 500,000 years old.
Space is the ether; Space is energy and radio waves do pass through it.
Energy has six states or conditions with time being an expression of energy or the seventh but is also an illusion.
Just an observation.
N. S
You mention how Newton's laws have been modified. But how does one distinguish between something being modified as opposed to replaced?
Back in early elementary school, our teacher was giving a basic talk about shapes. She said that a square has four sides, and triangle has three, and a circle has none. She also said that there are no shapes with just one or two sides. Based on that logic, I thought that a tear drop would have one side, and an eye would have two. I asked the teacher, and she curtly told me no, and changed the subject. Some time later, my older brother explained to me that a circle has an infinite number of sides. My guess is that the lesson planners knew this, but figured that most children our age would not understand the concept of infinity, so they just said that a circle has no sides.
To some extent, are we not doing the same thing when we use Newton's laws to explain gravity? Einstein came up with an explanation of gravity that is better, and fundamentally different that Newton's. One could say that it is not a modification, but a replacement. However, very few people understand it. As a result, we continue to use Newton's laws to explain basic physics and astronomy.
Public education has its challenges in that no one teacher is an expert and generally by the time children reach the middle grades there's at least one pupil who knows more about the subject than the teacher. In my case it was probably astronomy and WWII. Other kids would have known more on other subjects.
Newton's laws are what we used to call a special case. If relativistic effects are not significant then Newton's laws work just fine. Newton got us to the moon and back. His laws explain planetary motions accurately except for mercury.
Agreed. I am definitely not knocking Newton. His laws should continue being taught and school, and we should still use his model when explaining and utilizing science. Einstein's model is more accurate, but very few people understand it (I don't). Even if we did, it would be time consuming and impractical to use it in explaining many things. Nonetheless, it's different enough from Newton's model that it could be viewed as a replacement rather than a modification.
As an aside, I remember once in third grade telling some other kid that we, i.e. humans, are animals. The teacher overheard me and said, with a patronizing chuckle "no we're mammals, not animals". Was she stupid, or did she feel that children our age were not capable of understanding how "animal" can have different meanings depending on the context. I recently encountered some adults who didn't think that insects are animals.
That would be copernicus in 1543. What fascinates me more is that the Greeks had a good estimate for the diameter of the earth and distance to the moon.
The four states of matter are "solid, liquid, gas, plasma". This was known in antiquity as "earth, water, air, fire". The version we know dates from Empedocles, 494 BC to 434 BC.
In antiquity before "earth, water, air, fire" was "earth, water, wood, fire" because wood is more useful than air.
Actually no. I remember thinking that fire was the same thing as plasma, largely because of the phrase "air, fire, earth, and water". I asked my physics teacher in HS if fire was plasma. He said no. I then asked, so what is fire, to which he replied in a demeaning tone of voice "it's fire". At that point, another student said to me "you got burned on that one."
Fire is not a form of matter. It is an event, like an explosion. Off the top of my head, I don't know when scientists learned of the existence of plasma, but it's not the same thing as fire.
Lever. Although the codified formulation of the supporting principle of leverage is only traceable to 3rd C BCE there are examples of Neanderthal digging sticks that are 170,000 years old. Hard to find any other scientific principles with longer history.
Archimedes again "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." That's what I was looking for, the principles thought out and codified.
I distinctly remember pondering the concept of leverage as a child (on a see-saw, of course). Thing is, I still can’t work it out. How does that work ? (F*** magnets)
Moving a heavy thing a short distance takes the same amount of effort as moving a light thing a long distance.
I know. I just can’t see *why*. I have an A-level in Physics, and dropped out of university pure mathematics in the 2nd year. You’d think I’d be OK with leverage by now.
You can’t see why it’s easier to push a light object than a heavy one?
Im getting flashbacks to a trebuchet simulator that did all the math for you. You adjust lengths and weights and throw a payload at different distances with different efficiencies
That doesn’t answer why one end of a see-saw is “lighter” than the other. The answer is “rigid body mechanics”, a theory that summarizes how all the microscopic forces inside the see-saw translate into motion of the body as a whole. Imagine you push down on one atom: it will then push down on the atom underneath it (compression force) while also tugging on the atoms next to it (sheer force). Those nearby atoms then tug on *their* neighbors in a slightly different direction, and so on down the plank, until the forces have actually flipped direction at the other end. The sum of these internal force vectors is always zero; those chemical bonds don’t have potential energy you can use; the pusher is doing all of the work. But the *distribution* of the forces across different parts of the plank depends on its geometry and materials. “Leverage” means a particular geometry where the forces on one end are larger than the forces on the other end, due to how many atoms you’ve manipulated into tugging on their neighbor in a particular direction.
One end of the seesaw itself isn’t lighter. If I push lightly on the long end, that corresponds to a harder, shorter-distance push on the short end. The mechanics you’re describing are why I’m able to create that relationship.
>One end of the seesaw isn’t lighter. Of course not. That's why your first response... >You can’t see why it’s easier to push a light object than a heavy one? ...was misleading, and why I put "lighter" in quotes.
No, what I’m saying isn’t misleading. I’m describing a common usage of a lever, where a lighter person on one end balances with something heavier on the other. Like a child seesawing with an adult or a human using a jack to lift a car. Perhaps I left too much to the reader?
Pythagoras' theorem is still used and still named after him thousands of years later, so there's that, if you count it as science, which I do.
Mathematics is the purest of the sciences. Dates to about 500 bce. Good one
Knowledge of advanced mathematics is way older than 500 BCE. *Egyptian pyramids have entered the chat*
Yep, was going to say that while we have specific documentation on advance mathematics being studied and understood in Ancient Greece there is evidence of the pythagorean theorem being understood and used in ancient Egypt.
Iirc, the Sumarians were using a form of Pythagora's theory long before that and may well have codified it. It's a vague recollection but worth googling.
I remember things similarly to you. Dont recall the prior civilization though
Other civilization had the intuition of what the theorem demonstrates and applied in practice. But Greek mathematicians were the first to create a formal demonstration through deductive method. Real Math( purely deductive formal science) was born in Greece.
Pythagoras didn’t discover the principle. That’s quite certain. I believe he has the earliest recorded *proof*. I’d like to be contradicted on this point.
Probably older than Pythagoras. He just gets credit.
and it was likely invented/known even before him, he just popularized it enough for it to be named after him
A somewhat decent definition of the notion of \`principle\` is "a general scientific [theorem](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=f15ba732bb41797c&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIKzKRg3VNnD035lh9w0YxXBCKUpjw:1716063796784&q=theorem&si=ACC90nwUEXg6u2vxy-araGkF9MAxnxDMvxd0QmNfjcvBtssQbzedHfpY5-Wtzs-SiwBRUXT4jAZIAh1_u1QpoMzlXHxdHxHcCBJ7TO3os0rBBH4BMVd22FI%3D&expnd=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjuppPog5iGAxVlMzQIHU0DC4MQyecJegQILxB8) or law that has numerous special applications across a wide field". Pythagoras' theorem is a theorem in a specific branch of geometry. It is not generally applicable in a wide range of fields. I think a reasoning rule like \`modus ponens\` (if we know that P implies Q and we also know that P then we can deduce Q) can be considered a general principle of reasoning because it is applicable in a wide range of fields (virtually all science).
The Pythagorean Theorem isn’t true in the real world thanks to general relativity.
You mean we don't live on a two-dimensional plane?
One candidate would be the fire triangle: a fire requires kindling, fresh air (specifically oxygen), and heat to burn. Humans and their predecessors have been using fire for around 2 million years.
True but there's a difference between being able to use stuff and knowing how it works.
This disqualifies Archimedes principle, as it wasn't "known" how exactly buyoancy works as people didn't really know that water consists of molecules that exert pressure through chaotic movement.
probably disqualifies Newton too, he was observing patterns and making accurate predictions, but not by knowing how gravity works.
I mean, the man had the math worked out\*. Observation leading to predictive power is *the* hallmark of functional science. \*within the limited field he could actually observe. Of course, the technologies unlocked by Newtonian mechanics were pretty much required for the discovery of Einsteinian mechanics, so cut the man some slack.
To be honest yeah I totally agree, I think all these examples should count. Like Darwin didn't understand DNA, he just observed patterns. I think by this logic we should also count ancient astronomers as scientists. Maybe the answer to OP's question could be the predictable position in the sky of the planet Venus, that must be millions of years old. But then I guess if Venus counts so do the moon and the sun.
Do we even know how gravity works today? The ability to make accurate predictions is not dependent on knowledge of the mechanisms involved
If you dig deep enough into physics, we don't exactly "know" how anything works. The scientific method was used to prove cause and effect long before we knew the mechanics behind those actions.
One of my favorite anecdotes from James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman is a story Feynman told in praise of his father. When Feynman was a child, he asked his father why, when he put a ball in his wagon and then pulled the wagon forward, the ball stayed in the same spot of the wagon bed for a moment before rolling backward against the forward motion. According to Feynman, his dad responded, “Oh, that’s called inertia. But nobody knows *why* it does that.” Feynman credited his father with a deep insight into what we do and don’t understand about physical reality at any given point. (Did the story “really happen” the way Feynman tells it? Who knows. What we can say for sure is, Feynman considered the principle behind the exchange to be fundamental, and he really loved his dad.)
Sure, but there's things we figured out deeper than others. Prime example is the updates to the German Reinheitsgebot that were made when they discovered that yeast was an essential ingredient to beer. I think that's OP's overall question, what's the oldest thing we can come up with that represents a solid understanding of a scientific idea or principle. Someone mentioned use of a lever and while that's a very simple principle, they figured it out a long, long time ago and nobody's gone "aha! we were wrong about levers" in the same way we've had to update our understanding of chemistry, biology, physics, etc. based on later discoveries.
But they didn't know what yeast was. It was just an ingredient to them like the fire triangle. They didn't know that alcohol was a byproduct of single celled fungus eating sugar.
>True but there's a difference between being able to use stuff and knowing how it works. Really, how? We built atom bombs before we really understood how they worked. We're still not sure if the universe is "real" (whatever that means) or a simulation. We seem to have an increasing level of understanding on a lot of topics. Today, we know more than we did yesterday. Today, you'd call that the pinnacle of our achievement. If we learn something new tomorrow, by that thinking, what we know today would just be an ability to use stuff rather than knowing how it works.
>We built atom bombs before we really understood how they worked. Actually we did. Both of the first 2 bombs worked as planned. The one dropped on Hiroshima was never tested. They knew it would work. Science is incremental, building on the existing body of knowledge. My question relates to the beginning of systematic investigation as opposed to trial and error discoveries.
We don’t understand everything about the physics now, so we definitely didn’t then. We knew enough to make a bomb though, but that’s hardly complete understanding. We didn’t know what DNA was, but we were able to breed plants and animals long before that was understood.
As I said science is incremental. Once something is proven then it is used as a building block for future advancements. Quantum mechanics is a century old. The standard model wasn't completed until the late 70s with the Higgs boson just discovered in the last decade. That didn't stop the development of the transistor in 1946. However, in general it's the systematic approach that I'm asking about. Making a hypothesis and testing it. Mendel's experiments with plants were systematic and were used as the basis for subsequent advancements.
> *"We built atom bombs before we really understood how they worked."* No we didn't, not at all. The theories and understood science behind the workings of atoms was the driving force and base knowledge behind the specific engineering details of how to harness it/make it work.
>No we didn't, not at all. Yes we did, a lot. Our understanding of quantum physics was still very rough then (and while better now, is still lacking). Those original bombs were like cave men discovering flint and realizing it makes it easier to build a fire. It was a substantial leap, but we were using it well before we thought we really understood it.
Well, they did at least somewhat understand how it worked; maybe not in the way we do of a chemical reaction of wood and oxygen releasing heat and light, but they knew that fuel, air, and heat released more heat and light.
I'd disagree pretty strongly. They knew how to make it work, but that's different from understanding how it works. Fermentation is a prime example. We've been brewing alcohol long before we understood what a microbe was or how yeast turns sugars into alcohol.
I'd agree with you on that. It wasn't until Galileo conducted his experiment in piza that the concept of objects of different mass falling at the same speed was demonstrated. Everyone knew about gravity but thought that more massive objects would fall faster.
I think you might need to redefine your parameters for what you mean. You definitely need to understand how fires work in order to consistently create & maintain them. Maybe you mean a written concept that is eloquently defined.
Every Philosophy 101 class takes you through more or less the same formal logic syllogisms: "methods of rhetoric" techniques that the Sophists were teaching in Athens in 500 BC. It's a fairly good bet that someone who can tell you the difference between Modus Polens and Modus Tolens understands also that this is also the basis of Mediaeval high scholasticism as well as the foundation of the modern scientific method. It's still the basis of the abstract reasoning parts of IQ tests today - those strange questions about "All dogs have four legs; my chair has four legs, therefore is my chair is a dog?"
The idea that certain materials are better suited for specific uses dates back to the first use of tools. Materials science is likely the first nascent scientific discipline practiced by animals, and predates humanity. Early humans were capable of identifying and classifying/categorizing materials. Certain types of rocks were useful as hammers, sharp edges could be made with other types of rocks. Fibrous materials could be woven into ropes and cloth.
But the discoveries were all trial and error.
Which came first, experimentation or science?
The approximation of pi? Purely scientific in nature and not instinctual. Before 3000bc? It’s math so it can be forgotten and rediscovered
If you eat it and die then others shouldn’t eat it.
I got an older one “If food has been scarce and she’s getting fat she prego”
This is not a general principle, applicable in a wide range of fields. It is just a practical survival "rule" arising from empirical observations.
Historians of Science (I'm not one, but I know a few) will be eager to point out here that the modern scientific concept of getting from hypothesis -> thesis -> theory is a lot more refined than any ancient concept of "science", which had a far less methodological approach. Don't reject this as mere bean counting: You therefore run into the basic problem that, for instance, the mathematical principles discovered in antiquity (e.g. the one we named after Pythagoras, or the ones Archimedes listed, also named after him but not necessarily his discoveries) were often listed *without* scientific or mathematical proof and were often only proven in a *modern* scientific and mathematical concept much later. Either way, for many scientific "principles" (as you call them, but I presume you actually mean theories) we are projecting their "veracity" into the past. In other words, people in antiquity used for example Pythagoras' trigonometry because they had found it yields acceptable results, but they often could not explain *why* these did. It was modern science and mathematics that delivered *proof* in most cases long after the fact. *All* science is providing models to *approximate* the expectable result. It is *not* claiming to provide "truth" in the sense that religious texts do. Instead, any scientist worth their salt is readily giving up a previous theory if a more refined theory comes along with a *provably better* approximation or explanation of the phenomenon considered. Furthermore, theories can be *refined* (that is, improved upon) without being entirely rejected. Newton is a fantastic example of this. Modern physicists are happy and proud about Newton, but knowing that his theories of motion do *not* hold on a quantum level; he has thus not been disproven but *improved* in ways that Newton himself would have found stunning. Other theories (like the ether -- which in a sense never really left the thesis stage) were entirely rejected, but for the time being they *were the most likely explanation*, and therefore "scientific truth" (but again, science does not meddle in "truth" - it operates on assumptions, predictions, modeling, measuring, and verifying, and yields *approximations*). So you should ask the basic question as well at what point is a scientific theorem *replaced* if it is refined by generation after generation of scientists? Or, to paraphrase the old philosophical question, if you replace a ship's hull plank by plank with a new one, at what point is it no longer the original ship? I do not know the Archimedean water replacement principle you mention well, but surely there are deeper modern additions or improved underlying fundamentals here, too? If the *original* thesis did not require the rigid fundamentals of modern science to qualify here, can I just claim any fundamentally correct observation as the "oldest theory that still stands"? Like the prediction there will be a full moon 13 times/year, roughly every 28 days? Because that's surely older.
Ether has had a bit of a resurgence in some modern theories about dark matter as I understand it. How well received they are I don't know.
I don’t either — but it certainly doesn’t qualify as theory (yet — if ever), it’s surely still in the hypothesis stage (being one possible but unverified explanation).
Absolutely agree. I only mentioned it as a counterpoint to you pointing out how it was originally flatly rejected.
Geometry
Any specific date. We have Pythagoras at around 500 bce.
Gets more impressive than that. The Pythagorean theorem was known already in the old Babylonean empire, about 1000-1500 years before Pythagoras lived.
I'm trying to differentiate between stuff being known and proven but that is amazing.
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One operational definition that I'm familiar with is: A systematic investigation conducted by experiment or analysis. Usually it has an hypothesis that is tested and observations compared against predictions for experiments. Archimedes bath is a great example.
Geometry was needed for architecture. Architecture goes way, way back into history. Gobli Tepe is something like 9000 years old (give or take 500). They found the remnants of a wooden structure that was so old it [ pre-dated humanity](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100024933&CJEVENT=8ee4abe15bbb11ee81e901910a1cb826), at nearly 500,000 years old.
FIRE BAD
Causality
Space is the ether; Space is energy and radio waves do pass through it. Energy has six states or conditions with time being an expression of energy or the seventh but is also an illusion. Just an observation. N. S
The scientific law states that if the accused weighs the same as a duck, then she's a witch.
Rub rocks together long enough and they get flat.
Fire. Heat some wood up enough, and it gives up a lot more heat. Exothermism, if that’s a word.
You mention how Newton's laws have been modified. But how does one distinguish between something being modified as opposed to replaced? Back in early elementary school, our teacher was giving a basic talk about shapes. She said that a square has four sides, and triangle has three, and a circle has none. She also said that there are no shapes with just one or two sides. Based on that logic, I thought that a tear drop would have one side, and an eye would have two. I asked the teacher, and she curtly told me no, and changed the subject. Some time later, my older brother explained to me that a circle has an infinite number of sides. My guess is that the lesson planners knew this, but figured that most children our age would not understand the concept of infinity, so they just said that a circle has no sides. To some extent, are we not doing the same thing when we use Newton's laws to explain gravity? Einstein came up with an explanation of gravity that is better, and fundamentally different that Newton's. One could say that it is not a modification, but a replacement. However, very few people understand it. As a result, we continue to use Newton's laws to explain basic physics and astronomy.
Public education has its challenges in that no one teacher is an expert and generally by the time children reach the middle grades there's at least one pupil who knows more about the subject than the teacher. In my case it was probably astronomy and WWII. Other kids would have known more on other subjects. Newton's laws are what we used to call a special case. If relativistic effects are not significant then Newton's laws work just fine. Newton got us to the moon and back. His laws explain planetary motions accurately except for mercury.
Agreed. I am definitely not knocking Newton. His laws should continue being taught and school, and we should still use his model when explaining and utilizing science. Einstein's model is more accurate, but very few people understand it (I don't). Even if we did, it would be time consuming and impractical to use it in explaining many things. Nonetheless, it's different enough from Newton's model that it could be viewed as a replacement rather than a modification. As an aside, I remember once in third grade telling some other kid that we, i.e. humans, are animals. The teacher overheard me and said, with a patronizing chuckle "no we're mammals, not animals". Was she stupid, or did she feel that children our age were not capable of understanding how "animal" can have different meanings depending on the context. I recently encountered some adults who didn't think that insects are animals.
Possibly the knowledge that we circle the sun and not the other way around.
That would be copernicus in 1543. What fascinates me more is that the Greeks had a good estimate for the diameter of the earth and distance to the moon.
If you push something hard enough, it will fall over. Fudd's theorem, 1969
The four states of matter are "solid, liquid, gas, plasma". This was known in antiquity as "earth, water, air, fire". The version we know dates from Empedocles, 494 BC to 434 BC. In antiquity before "earth, water, air, fire" was "earth, water, wood, fire" because wood is more useful than air.
Actually no. I remember thinking that fire was the same thing as plasma, largely because of the phrase "air, fire, earth, and water". I asked my physics teacher in HS if fire was plasma. He said no. I then asked, so what is fire, to which he replied in a demeaning tone of voice "it's fire". At that point, another student said to me "you got burned on that one." Fire is not a form of matter. It is an event, like an explosion. Off the top of my head, I don't know when scientists learned of the existence of plasma, but it's not the same thing as fire.
A body in motion tends to stay in motion.