It's All Greek To Me!

How do you know what you know? Seriously, think of something you are sure is true right now. How did you come to know that truth? Do you believe that humans are basically good or evil? Do we have souls, or are we purely material, and what is the meaning of life? Is there a God, and is she in a good mood? With the economy the way it is, it's unlikely that most of us have had a lot of time to ponder the deeper meanings in life. Socrates would be greatly disappointed in us for this. And so would Archimedes.

The Socratic Method is the practical application of Socrates' belief in self-examination. It began circa 430 BCE, so the story goes, with a bunch of young Athenians who were trying to find the answers to life's biggest questions. They sought out Socrates, a bricklayer and veteran, who had a most curious way of discussing matters of truth. Rather than making quotable statements or using flowery words to push his point across, he asked questions. For example, if one of them stated that “Love always gives and never seeks to receive,” Socrates might answer, “If love never receives, what will it have left to give?” His entire point in life was to make people say, “Hmmmmm . . . .”

While he was mostly concerned with ethical and spiritual matters, he did use his questioning method as a way of trying to understand the world around him. Archimedes was born hundreds of years after Socrates' death, but it seems obvious from his discoveries that he used the same principles of critical thinking. One of the most famous stories (though it's believed to be Apocryphal) is that of the riddle that King Heiro II posed. A local goldsmith had forged a golden crown, and the King was suspicious that it was a fake. He asked Archimedes to find a way to prove it, so the mathematician went to work. He thought deeply about the subject, but couldn't come to a good conclusion, so he took a bath to relax before going at the problem again. While in the bath, he observed the water rising and falling, and realized that he could use the principle of buoyancy (which he basically created) to determine whether the crown was real or a cheap knock-off.

Greek thinking started with how to think, and it was only when the ancients strayed from the art of questioning that they plunged the known world into an intellectual dark age, with only a few bright lights like Archimedes to lead the way. Aristotle, a student of Plato (who was a student of Socrates) went about using inquisition to determine the natural world. After Alexander the Great, his student, took that knowledge with him to every place he conquered, it became concrete fact for the next thousand years. History loves irony, and so it stands that the scholastic line of Socrates ends with someone claiming absolute truth over the natural world.

Pax vobixcum