From the Oregonian:
Consider the galley slave, clad in rags, chained to a hardwood bench and clinging to an oar as long as a three-story flagpole. A burly man with a whip walks back and forth shouting encouragement. You've seen the movie.
That galley slave would have known that the rowing stations in the middle of the ship were best, though he might not have known why. That took scholars to figure out.
"Think of the oar as a lever," said Mark Schiefsky, a professor in the classics department at Harvard. "Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight."
The longer the lever arm on the rower's side of the fulcrum, the easier to move the weight. In the middle of the ship, as the rowers knew, the distance from hands to oarlock was longest.
This explanation is given in Problem 4 of the classical Greek treatise "Mechanical Problems," from the third century B.C., the first known text on the science of mechanics and the first to explain how a lever works. It preceded, by at least a generation, Archimedes' "On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures," which presented the first formal proof of the law of the lever.
Sophocles for fun
Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun. He majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines such as the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw -- and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.
The text record begins with "Mechanical Problems," moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.
A surprising number of old and extremely old scientific texts have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. The Archimedes Web site lists far more than 100, including Euclid's geometry, Hero of Alexandria's Roman-era technical manual on crossbows and catapults, medieval treatises on algebra and mechanics by Jordanus de Nemore and Galileo's 17th century defense of a heliocentric solar system.
The nice thing for Schiefsky is that hardly anyone reads the stuff. Scientists generally are not into ancient Greek or Latin, let alone Arabic, and most of Schiefsky's colleagues work on literature, philosophy, philology or archaeology. In fact, Schiefsky suggests that "about 100 people" worldwide work on both science and the classics.
By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics -- or, at least, mechanics -- is based on an interplay between practice and theory. The practical use comes first, theory second. Artisans build machines and use them but do not think about why they work. Theorists explain the machines and then derive principles that can be used to construct more complex machines.
What ancients understood
The Archimedes researchers say that by studying this dialectic they can better understand what people knew about the natural world at a given time and how that knowledge may have affected their lives.
The author of "Mechanical Problems" certainly understood how a lever worked, but it was Archimedes who described the precise relationship between the weights and their distances from the fulcrum.
"He made this into a fundamental principle of theoretical mechanical knowledge that could be used by practitioners," Schiefsky said. Classical tradition credits Archimedes as having said, "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth."
"And the principle," Schiefsky said, "is that there is a proportionality between the force and the load, no matter how big the load. This is an intellectual transformation."
Consider the galley slave, clad in rags, chained to a hardwood bench and clinging to an oar as long as a three-story flagpole. A burly man with a whip walks back and forth shouting encouragement. You've seen the movie.
That galley slave would have known that the rowing stations in the middle of the ship were best, though he might not have known why. That took scholars to figure out.
"Think of the oar as a lever," said Mark Schiefsky, a professor in the classics department at Harvard. "Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight."
The longer the lever arm on the rower's side of the fulcrum, the easier to move the weight. In the middle of the ship, as the rowers knew, the distance from hands to oarlock was longest.
This explanation is given in Problem 4 of the classical Greek treatise "Mechanical Problems," from the third century B.C., the first known text on the science of mechanics and the first to explain how a lever works. It preceded, by at least a generation, Archimedes' "On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures," which presented the first formal proof of the law of the lever.
Sophocles for fun
Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun. He majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines such as the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw -- and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.
The text record begins with "Mechanical Problems," moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.
A surprising number of old and extremely old scientific texts have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. The Archimedes Web site lists far more than 100, including Euclid's geometry, Hero of Alexandria's Roman-era technical manual on crossbows and catapults, medieval treatises on algebra and mechanics by Jordanus de Nemore and Galileo's 17th century defense of a heliocentric solar system.
The nice thing for Schiefsky is that hardly anyone reads the stuff. Scientists generally are not into ancient Greek or Latin, let alone Arabic, and most of Schiefsky's colleagues work on literature, philosophy, philology or archaeology. In fact, Schiefsky suggests that "about 100 people" worldwide work on both science and the classics.
By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics -- or, at least, mechanics -- is based on an interplay between practice and theory. The practical use comes first, theory second. Artisans build machines and use them but do not think about why they work. Theorists explain the machines and then derive principles that can be used to construct more complex machines.
What ancients understood
The Archimedes researchers say that by studying this dialectic they can better understand what people knew about the natural world at a given time and how that knowledge may have affected their lives.
The author of "Mechanical Problems" certainly understood how a lever worked, but it was Archimedes who described the precise relationship between the weights and their distances from the fulcrum.
"He made this into a fundamental principle of theoretical mechanical knowledge that could be used by practitioners," Schiefsky said. Classical tradition credits Archimedes as having said, "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth."
"And the principle," Schiefsky said, "is that there is a proportionality between the force and the load, no matter how big the load. This is an intellectual transformation."