or Physis was
the Greek word for the material cosmos we can sense
and measure and attempt to predict.
This
view of the Ganga River in India at dawn in the holy city of Varanasi (Benares)
suggests that the Greeks were not alone in their quest to understand, predict,
measure and examine nature. Hindu mathematicians and
Chinese astronomers recorded the accurate movement of celestial bodies for the
better part of a thousand years.
The enduring qualities of material existence
were examined by experts. In the Greek city of Miletus in Ionia these thinkers
who examined nature were referred to by Plato and Aristotle as: physikoi,
the natural philosophers or philosophers of nature. Among them was Thales who
conceived of the primordial origin of the cosmic regularity sensed my us in
the universe was the primary element of water.
F
ire, water, earth and air emerged
from among the ideas discussed by the fysikoi , or physikoi as the four elements that combine to form the sensory reality
of the material world.
Material for the Greeks was an underlying substance common to all, while others in Greek thought argued that only forms have existence and what we perceive are mere reflections of eternal, invariable and transcendent things. There were also Greek thinkers who argued, instead that, as Parmenides asserted, only ideas apprehended by the mind have true reality.
Science incorporates each of these ways of distinguishing reality from fantasy by the following practices:
practices |
meaning |
radis, root word |
implications |
|---|---|---|---|
rationality |
reason |
ratio |
logical & understood |
empiricism |
experiment |
empirical |
refutable & tested |
heuristics |
discovery |
eureka |
intuitive & provable |
Physics,
physician, and physiology all stem from this same root word: fusis .
By the time of Heraclitus (BCE 234) this word Physis, was the equivalent
of our idea of nature. Nature here referred to the indestructible, elemental,
immortal totality of the cosmos -- which Plato said was a living being. In the
Greek debate as to the exact meaning of physis
is a revealing paradox in our relationship to our surroundings.
Three distinct -- yet related and tightly connected, meanings emerged from the early arguments of the philosophers from the time of Thales to the death of Ptolemy. First was the idea of growth and the process referred to as genesis for the origins of life. Secondly, it referred to the primordial material: arche, arce, in Greek, out of which the perceivable universe is crafted. Third the word referred to the internal principle of organization that makes things function according to a process. Some argued that nature referred to the organizational patterns inherent in all things. Hercalitus and Democritus argued that nature referred to the "structure of things."
The new Hubble view of the cosmos, a composite map of the structure of deep space the universe:
What then accounts for the order of things, the importance of physical knowledge in relation to the other ideas we cobble together as we design our worldview. Do the ideas we believe about the world actually correspond well and effectively with the world we actually inhabit?
This is the task of the physical sciences, to reveal the order, periodicity, form, function, structural dynamics and inherent meaning of actual material existence.
Wilzeck, Physics Lecture on Our Strange and Beautiful Universe
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