Richard Carrier

Richard Carrier in Berkeley

For a nice contrast to what the Christians were writing and arguing about all the way from Paul to Nicea, and the Jews for centuries before that, how about a look at what was going on among pagan intellectuals over the same period? When we survey the achievements of the Greeks and Romans in the various sciences, the Bible looks like it was written in a completely different time and place, by a people ignorant of the scientific advances going on around them, and the ideals and methods that were necessary for those advances to happen. So for anyone who wants to hear that story, I'll be speaking on it in Berkeley, California, a few weeks from now.

Saturday, May 13 - Richard Carrier on "Science and Scientists in Ancient Greece and Rome" for East Bay Atheists

TIME: 2pm (Saturday, May 13); LOCATION: Berkeley, California, in the City of Berkeley Main Library, 2090 Kittredge Street, 3rd floor Meeting Room (Kittredge near the Downtown Berkeley BART); SUBJECT: Richard Carrier, author of Sense and Goodness without God (or via: amazon.co.uk), will be speaking on his professional area of expertise: a survey of the most interesting characters and achievements in ancient science, with some discussion of the cultural circumstances, and Q&A. After the talk Carrier will be signing and selling copies of his book for $20, which isn't about ancient science, but Carrier's philosophy of life, covering everything from how we know to what there is and what we should do. URL FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.eastbayatheists.org/meetings.html

dongiovanni1976x

Anyone know if this will be recorded?

sunspark

Yeah, California is kind of out of my reach.

Toto

Richard Carrier will speak for free to your group if you can pay for transportation and lodging (which might be a spare bedroom). If you can't make this speech, consider setting up a lecture in your home town and pooling your frequent flyer miles or your pennies.

http://www.columbia.edu/~rcc20/speaking.html

Richard Carrier

Thanks for the plug. Yes, that's all true.

But in answer to the original query, no, this upcoming event will will not be recorded, nor would a recording be distributed if it were made. But I did do a show for the Rational Response Squad that will be available online in a month or so (I'll announce when it does), and more shows for Freethought Media are on the way.

BTW, people who want to be notified by email of all my upcoming events can email me and state that they want to be on my notification list (mail to rcarrier@infidels.org).

Michael R. Jordan

Mr. Carrier,

Correct me if i am wrong but wouldnt such practices in Ancient Greece and Rome be referred to as natural philosophy or natural philosophers rather than science? my rather limited understanding is that such practices was denoted as science only after the methodological approach of the scientific method was utilized.

Richard Carrier

That's one of the issues I shall be discussing. The answer depends on how you define science. The history of science community (as represented, for example, by the History of Science Society) has largely sided with the broader definition: a pattern of correct theoretical discoveries regarding the operation of nature is science, regardless of how these discoveries are made or in what intellectual context. The distinction is then made between ancient science and modern science (and within the ancient context, a distinction is made between remarkable and unremarkable scientific progress).

Ancient science, as you observe, was principally pursued in the context of (and hence subordinated to) natural philosophy and employed methods comparable to modern scientific method as well as other methodologies, typically without distinguishing between them. Nevertheless, ancient science produced incredible advances in theoretical discovery (far beyond what most people are aware) and was overtly conscious of methodology (debates about scientific methodology were, IMO, tracking toward the modern view before the social and economic system collapsed). Some thus distinguish a third category, primitive science, to characterize "science" (in the broad sense above) that lacks any clear consciousness methodology and that makes slow and haphazard or merely practical progress (such as the "science" of agriculture before the Roman period or the "science" of glass manufacture, etc.).

In contrast, modern science is science that has become recognized as its own distinct discipline (from both philosophy and religion--modern Christian attempts to change that notwithstanding) and that elevates to supreme status two particular methodological tools: hypothetical-deductive method and consensus-building. Together, those three developments are what constitute the Scientific Revolution.

Michael R. Jordan

Interesting. Would you then claim Atomism to be from science?

If i may get off-topic, will you be making your way to Canada in the near future?

GakuseiDon

Hi Richard, I've been wondering about your thoughts on "The God Who Wasn't There" movie if you have time. But rather than derail this thread, I've started a new one here:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=165230

I did a review of the movie (link in the thread above), and it appears to have information in there that I believe you may disagree with (specifically, the "Jesus copycat" idea), so I would be interested in your thoughts on the movie, if you have time. (I actually use some of your comments in my review, and I hope they represent your views accurately).

lpetrich

I'm not RC, but I think I'll take a stab at that. Atomism has been around for many centuries, but it was little more than hand-waving, and not much more than an intellectual fashion that would come and go.

That changed with John Dalton's work. Working from Lavoisier's concept of chemical elements and Proust's law of definite proportions, he proposed in 1808 that elements were composed of atoms with a constant weight per element that would often combine in simple numerical proportions. Thus, he proposed that water is HO (hydrogen + oxygen). We now know that it's H2O; such ambiguities were a serious problem at first.

An important step forward was the Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases in the mid-19th-cy., which explained a variety of phenomena, and which supported the relative weights of atoms found from chemistry. There were other steps forward, like the properties of dissolved materials, but the real clincher, however, was the demonstration by Perrin and Einstein in the first decade of the 20th cy. that Brownian Motion is the result of microscopic particles being randomly bounced around by molecules.

But by then, it had already been established that chemical-element atoms were not truly "atomic", that they contained smaller particles: electrons. And around then, Rutherford had discovered that atoms also contain nuclei, which contain most of their mass, but which were much smaller than the atoms themselves.

Nuclei were discovered to have masses that were approximately integer multiples of a proton's mass -- with more mass than could be accounted for than by their proton content. This led to speculations about a "neutral proton", nowadays called a neutron, which was discovered by Chadwick in 1932.

And in the 1960's and 1970's, it was discovered that protons, neutrons, and other "hadrons" are also composite -- composed of quarks and gluons.

But the elementary particles of the Standard Model of physics are generally not expected to be composite, but instead to be different versions of a few kinds of particles, or only one, as with string theory.

But quantum mechanics gives a picture of elementary particles (the "true" atoms) that is very different from traditional billiard-ball atomism. These entities not only have particle properties, but also wave properties; electrons in atoms are atom-sized standing wave, and some macroscopic entities, like electromagnetic and gravitational fields, are predominantly wavelike rather than particlelike.

Here's an interesting article: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atomism-modern

I think he's said that he'd be willing to travel if his hosts would be willing to finance his trip.