this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Much of Einstein's work we recognize as monumental were things that could not be proven in his time and were only validated decades later.
The Epicureans may not have had the scientific method available to them, but their focus on observation driven speculation was literally one of the factors that fed into its creation (see the Pulizer winning The Swerve).
You mean Einstein's equations? The maths that were solid enough to develop advanced destructive mechanisms and form entirely new theories equations?
To be clear, the prize for... art, and not journalism.
I'm not arguing that philosophy had no role in shaping history positively. Shaped history, yes. Came up with bright ideas, yes. Proved the atoms were arrangements of the four elements, not so much. Hedonism being the point of life, also not so much. Gave evidence for their claims? Very little more than speculation.
They gave contributions, yes. My point is they are contributors, but not giants in science. Having not had the method available to join the scientific revolution is core to this assertion.
Wasn't the Epicurean position. Lucretius only surmises that there were likely a few handfuls of base forms of indivisible parts and then a multitude of their combinations. In fact, he rejects the elemental view.
And given we jumped the gun on naming 'atoms' after the word for indivisible, the closer philosophical parallel to modern concepts is quanta. And in that context, you even have Lucretius claiming that the behaviors of said indivisible parts must have a degree of indeterminate outcomes beyond following static physical laws for there to be free will (long before Bell's work relating the behavior of quanta to superderminism). He also surmised that light was made up of indivisible parts that were extremely light and moving very, very fast around 2,000 years before Einstein proved the discrete nature of light.
They were right about everything from survival to the fittest, contribution of traits from each parent, the quantization of light, and the indeterminate behaviors of quanta literally thousands of years before these things are proven.
It wasn't mere happenstance that they ended up being the most correct about the physical world of all the schools of philosophy in antiquity. They had a concrete methodology behind their success, and frankly it's a methodology that modernity would do well to have learned more from.