Name: Roman Engineering: Crash Course History of Science #6
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:46:32.000Z
Duration: 12 min 29 s
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The Romans invented concrete over two thousands years ago and built roads which are still

They used arches and domes to create monumental buildings with big airy interiors that looked

And they moved thousands of tons of water using aqueducts to keep a bustling population

But did the Romans come up with ideas about physics?

Like why arches support weight differently than right-angled structures?

Did they ask proto-chemistry questions—that is, “what is stuff?”—such as which tiny

Let's look at what knowledge the Romans made in order to set up a debate that, spoiler

alert, is still going on: do you understand something when you can explain why it's

Or do you understand something when you can do things with it, even if you can't explain why?

The Romans inherited much of their knowledge from the Greeks.

From 323 to 31 BCE, the geometry, physics, astronomy, and other disciplines developed

by the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle spread throughout the Hellenistic world.

This “world” combined the parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe influenced by Greek thought

due in large part to Alexander's brief supervillain rampage.

In Alexandria, Egypt—the biggest of the seventy cities that Alexander named after

himself—the kings paid for the Museum, or “house of the muses.”

This wasn't a museum in the modern sense of the word but more like a research university.

In Pergamon, in what is now Turkey, the kings paid for the Library, which was—wait for

These institutions lasted for centuries, drawing visitors from far and wide.

Alas, over the same period of time that these Greeks were supporting research, a tribe from

central Italy called the Romans went on a new supervillain rampage… that also lasted

The Romans would continue to spread classical Greek thought: we even call their culture

But natural philosophy during Greco-Roman times didn't advance much.

Today, we remember the Romans for their engineering—or ability to improve some real-world system—not

their deep thoughts about why the world is the way it is.

Roman engineering built on Greek engineering.

Making knowledge is political, and most politicians really want the same thing: bigger catapults

So Greco-Roman leaders did what heads of state everywhere have always done: they paid smart

In the ancient Mediterranean, the job of building warmachines was called architecton, or architect.

Most of these “architects” were anonymous and didn't write down theories.

The most famous architecton, Archimedes of Syracuse, fought for the Greeks against the

Archimedes is famous today as a mathematician: he worked out many geometrical proofs

including the area of a circle, and pioneered infinitesimals and exponents.

Archimedes also invented a lot of useful contraptions, including the water screw and compound pulley.

The water screw pumps water by turning a screw inside a pipe.

This was immediately useful in irrigation.

And a mechanical way to move water uphill is just plain cool!

Archimedes also designed various warmachines to kill the Romans who were trying to take

He was so impressive that the Roman general ordered his troops to capture, not kill, him.

But one soldier particularly low on chill got frustrated when Archimedes wouldn't

In a sense, Archimedes kept it so real that he got himself and, symbolically, an era of

Archimedes was interested in some of the natural philosophy that explained his machines, but

for most other thinkers of his time, astronomy, physics, and math were important for abstract,

Making weapons was a matter of political power.

The heavens from which rain fell were perfect and abstract.

Shipbuilding was an art, something learned from practice.

It was not a matter of understanding hydrodynamics, or the chemical properties of wood that make

Aristotle came up with a handy division between these types of knowledge that we still use today.

He classified knowledge as either “useful” or “theoretical.”

Useful knowledge was called technē, which is where we get “technology.”

“Technology” has until recently, in historical terms, been connected to the idea of “art”—meaning

something you learn by doing, and can see in the real world.

Theoretical knowledge, on the other hand, was epistēmē—the root of our word epistemology,

Epistēmē is the sort of knowledge we most associate with “science.”

Science is abstract, represented by formulas.

When historians of science talk about the possibilities of what we can know, they use

One of the most influential thinkers working on epistemic questions during the Greco-Roman

period was Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek or Greek-speaking southern Egyptian living in Roman-held Alexandria.

In addition to optics and the science of music, Ptolemy took up Plato's old problem of how

to fit the observed data about how the planets move to the theory of a cosmos made of perfect

He got really, really into this, mixing together three kinds of solutions in order to make

the math work: epicycles, for example, were the tiny circles that the planets moved along…

Ptolemy's version of the cosmos, a mathematically neater version of Aristotle's and Plato's,

became the basis of the understanding of the universe across much of the medieval Christian

His great astronomical work, the Mathematical Syntaxis, was renamed by Arabic scholars as

Fun fact: the Almagest may have been edited by one of the first recorded female natural

So we're on episode six of History of Science and, yes,  this is the first mention of a woman...

Ptolemy was also pretty much the authority on earthly geography in the Greco-Roman world.

His book on the subject, called Geography, discusses the data he uses and why.

It provided a resource for other scholars to use in more accurately picturing and drawing

Oh, and none of these thinkers thought that the earth was flat.