One Greek thinker suggested that the Earth actually moved around the sun.
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Another thought that everything, the work of man and
nature was made of particles too small to see.
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Others estimated the sizes of the Earth and the moon and
the distances between them.
And reasoned that both were spheres.
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But it would be many centuries before we had the tools to extend our vision.
And confirm the wisdom of these early thinkers.
In the meantime, people around the world gazed on the stars and gave them names.
Most assumed that the Earth was the center of an unchanging universe.
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>> We will talk about the contribution of the ancient Greeks to science.
But they made an extraordinary set of contributions to other fields as well.
Obviously to philosophy and logic,
the foundational pieces of the scientific method.
But they also gave us strikingly modern ideas on systems of government, of law,
and of the city-state.
They had ideas in theater and music and
the arts that are still used to the present day.
While their ideas on medicine were perhaps a little archaic,
they also contained some rudiments of modern ideas.
In mathematics, they came up with the ideas of geometry,
algebra, the notion of infinity, and even the concept of irrational numbers.
And then strikingly, for people who may never have traveled more than a few dozen
miles in their lives, any educated ancient Greek knew that the Earth was round,
suspected that the sun was larger than the Earth, and
had the idea of a vast universe, much larger than the Earth itself.
What allowed a small set of people,
basically a set of interrelated city-states in the Aegean peninsula,
to come up with such radical ideas, so advanced for their time.
Nobody really knows, but unlike the fixed civilizations of Greece,
Mesopotamia, and Babylon, the Greeks were mobile.
They lived by trade and by their wits.
They traveled the Aegean, carrying things like the Antikythera mechanism,
trading in ideas and artifacts and technologies that they knew had value.