| | Origins of Scientific Thinking | What laws govern our universe? How shall we know them? How may this knowledge help us to comprehend the world and hence guide its actions to our advantage? Since the dawn of humanity, people have been deeply concerned by questions like these. At first, they had tried to make sense of those influences that do control the world by referring to the kind of understanding that was available from their own lives. They had imagined that whatever or whoever it was that controlled their surroundings would do so as they would themselves strive to control things: originally they had considered their destiny to be under the influence of beings acting very much in accordance with their own various familiar human drives. Such driving forces might be pride, love, ambition, anger, fear, revenge, passion, retribution, loyalty, or artistry. Accordingly, the course of natural events — such as sunshine, rain, storms, famine, illness, or pestilence — was to be understood in terms of the whims of gods or goddesses motivated by such human urges. And the only action perceived as influencing these events would be appeasement of the god-figures. But gradually patterns of a different kind began to establish their reliability. The precision of the Sun’s motion through the sky and its clear relation to the alternation of day with night provided the most obvious example; but also the Sun’s positioning in relation to the heavenly orb of stars was seen to be closely associated with the change and relentless regularity of the seasons, and with the attendant clear-cut influence on the weather, and consequently on vegetation and animal behaviour. The motion of the Moon, also, appeared to be tightly controlled, and its phases determined by its geometrical relation to the Sun. At those locations on Earth where open oceans meet land, the tides were noticed to have a regularity closely governed by the position (and phase) of the Moon. Eventually, even the much more complicated apparent motions of the planets began to yield up their secrets, revealing an immense underlying precision and regularity. If the heavens were indeed controlled by the whims of gods, then these gods themselves seemed under the spell of exact mathematical laws. Likewise, the laws controlling earthly phenomena — such as the daily and yearly changes in temperature, the ebb and flow of the oceans, and the growth of plants — being seen to be influenced by the heavens in this respect at least, shared the mathematical regularity that appeared to guide the gods... There were perceived to be other regularities in the behaviour of earthly objects. One of these was the tendency for all things in one vicinity to move in the same downward direction, according to the influence that we now call gravity. Matter was observed to transform, sometimes, from one form into another, such as with the melting of ice or the dissolving of salt, but the total quantity of that matter appeared never to change, which reflects the law that we now refer to as conservation of mass. In addition, it was noticed that there are many material bodies with the important property that they retain their shapes, whence the idea of rigid spatial motion arose; and it became possible to understand spatial relationships in terms of a precise, well-designed geometry — the 3-dimensional geometry that we now call Euclidean. Moreover, the notion of a ‘straight line’ in this geometry turned out to be the same as that provided by rays of light (or lines of sight). There was a remarkable precision and beauty to these ideas, which held a considerable fascination for the ancients, just as it does for us today. | — Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality - A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe | Indexes/03 |
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There is a remarkable accuracy and beauty of these ideas, held considerable charm, and for the ancients, just because it gives us today's meeting.
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