The Weakness of the Library of Alexandria

Both the work of research and the work of dissemination went on under serious handicaps. One of these was the great social gap that {152}separated the philosopher, who was a gentleman, from the trader and the artisan. There were glass workers and metal workers in abundance in those days, but they were not in mental contact with the thinkers. The glass worker was making the most beautifully coloured beads and phials and so forth, but he never made a Florentine flask or a lens. Clear glass does...

 The Glory of the Library of Alexandria

Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum {151}of Alexandria. For two or three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who measured the size of the earth and came within fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius who wrote o...

 Science Threatened Monarchical Power

Following the death of Christ and the preaching by his disciples, the promised prospect of salvation for all believers raised the Christian priest¬ hood to unprecedentedly powerful popularity. The combined religious and martial emperorship found its authoritarianly formulated credo (meaning "I believe") threatened by the B.C. Greek scientists' ever-unorthodox thinking and discovering. "Science," as Sir James Jeans said two millennia later, "is the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of ...

 Our Radio Broadcasts into Space are a Monologue

Some individuals find the absence of a dialogue distressing – as if meaningful dialogues were commonplace on this planet. Philip Morrison, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out that such cultural monologues are entirely common in the history of mankind; that, for example, the entire cultural patrimony of classical Greece, which has influenced our civilization in a profound way, has traveled in only one direction in time. We have not sent our wisdom to the Greeks. The G...