I happened to pick up a copy of Greek Science by Benjamin Farrington - well, time hangs heavy on retired hands, as Kipling warned us. The book is not new - part one was published in 1944, part two in 1949 - so is missing any more modern scholarship; perhaps also importantly BF was a professor of classics and in some respects seems uncomfortable with the actual science. Time and again he veers off into philosophy. Perhaps this is unavoidable; so much of the antient Greek stuff is actually that, and it is what they are really famous for, but nonetheless he lets himself get distracted at the expense of actually talking about science.
To get my headline thought out of the way early: it becomes ever clearer to me that, using the - correct - paradigm that science is characterised by conjectures and refutations, the antient Greeks were fertile in their conjectures but never really knuckled down to the hard work of refutations. And I can't resist adding that any old fool can come up with fairy stories. I'll also stick to my previous idea that none of this actually mattered to them, and it is unlikely that you will knuckle down to hard work about things that don't really matter.
BF himself evolves the idea that their problem was their slave society: since no self-respecting freeman ever did any manual work, they were a bit stuck for observing the proscessing of metal in forges, or even tinkering around. BF is a Marxist, though, so I'm suspicious of his sociology.
They had also fairly early on realised that, in a philosophical sense, it was difficult to see how you can acquire certain true knowledge as opposed to mere informed opinion about the world, from observation; and took the fork of retreating into the world of Ideals and Forms in search of Truth, which of course failed; but again, left them disinclined to spend much effort looking at the world.
But what, I hear you ask, of the actual science? This was most of my reason for picking up the book and I was disappointed by the thinness. We get, of course, Euclid; but that is maths, not science; BF gives no hint that he understands the difference. At one point he tells me that Archimedes invented the Archimedian screw, which does not fill me with confidence; and that no-one knows how it works; ditto. There is some geography, and some medicine, but of the latter very little of what they could actually do, and rather more of opinions.
BF wonders how it was that they achieved so much, and yet failed to step over into Modern Science - well, modern meaning the slow gradual rise that started ~1500 years after them. My answer would be that their apparent "so much" is largely illusion and exaggerated crippling respect; they were missing so much basic tech.
Overall BF is too deeply in thrall towards the antients-called-greats to be useful as anything other than a superficial introduction.
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