Are Plato and Aristotle worth reading? Well, time has proved that their ideas were not only false but bizarre and foolish! They might be great scholars for philosophy students but not for us scientists, right? Again, you are being too greedy for results. Of course, Results and Answers are our ultimate goals but there is a path required to reach this destination. This path has no shortcuts, and the ones who look for shortcuts learn reality the hard way. If these pre-Socrates and post-Socrates had not started taking random guesses at nature there would be no way we could have reached good answers. And we only know that all science today is just good answers because we are yet to find the exact ones. Unless we formulate “Theory of Everything”, we can’t be sure that the answers we have right now, are just good guesses or exact solutions. If you don’t know “Theory of Everything”, well it’s a hypothetical equation that is supposed to answer all the questions of the universe. I don’t wanna do this here but if I apply the Socratic method to just “Theory of Everything”: we know what ‘theory’ is, but we are not sure what does “Everything” represents. Can we specify this “Everything”? Certainly not! Not even close! We can't confirm what we do know is correct or not, how can we possibly know anything close to Everything? Now, if we don’t know what everything is how can we know that “Theory of Everything” exists? In short, there is no way of finding out if you are correct or not before making assumptions and testing them.
To give you a model, Plato's supernatural thoughts regarding the universe, regardless of whether wrong in their specifics, motivated hundreds of years of researchers to consider the universe as having underlying laws. Since before him, they just believed that the sky is a limit (in the literal sense) for mankind and related various domains and their divine beings, similar to the diversion of versifiers.
For Plato, the universe was perfect. Obvious! isn't it? It had amazing standards that could be examined. And all enormous stuff was comprised of particles that were perfect geometric “platonic solids”, each making one component: tetrahedrons of fire, cubes of earth, octahedrons of air, icosahedrons of water, and dodecahedrons as the state of the entire universe Plato's hypothesis of the sky expressed that the wandering stars( actually planets) followed a way of a uniform round movement. The meandering stars should move in perfect circles since the universe is precise.
Plato’s students could see that Mars seemed to jump backward, showing retrograde motion. As Plato didn’t really have an explanation, European astronomers would spend the next two thousand years meticulously trying to solve this problem and they’d end up learning a lot in the process. Now can you say that Plato did all that work in vain, cause he was proven wrong onwards?
Let’s look at another example: How did Aristotle expand on Plato's framework? How did Aristotle answer our central issues about material science, like, "what is matter?" He placed a total framework, joining the components and the sky. This turned into the reason for European pondering the actual world for 2,000 years and they didn't complain since it fitted their requirements, they didn't need to send spaceships out into the space, so their life was essentially satisfied with these hypotheses, unlike us. Aristotle's cosmology was theoretical, yet endeavored to sort out perceptions about the world. He crossed those equivalent four components, in addition to another enemy of void called æther, with four actual sensations: hot and cool, dry and wet, and utilized these to clarify everything: Earth was the heaviest component, so it was the focal point of the universe. Water was lighter than the earth so the seas lay on top of the earth. Air's regular state is above water. Fire sat on top of air, which is somewhat unusual, yet it goes up, And way out past these four circles, out past the Moon turned the stars, acting as indicated by their temperament as ætherial, or wonderful revolving, objects. Nature hates a vacuum! (as per him.) In Aristotle's universe, each of the components was effectively attempting to return to their normal states. For what reason did flares rise? They were simply attempting to return to the searing heavenly domain over the air.
From the Presocratics to Plato to Aristotle, we've wound up with a lot of circles within circles, each with a characteristic inclination. This affirmed the normal Bronze Age rancher's experience and our own. The earth appears to stop. Water sits on the planet. Air does not weigh (not literally). Aristotle perceived that components didn't generally exist in their pure form. A tree, for instance, was a mix of earth, water, and air: roots go down into the earth and branches very high. His hypothesis likewise worked for examinations. For what reason does a book fall quicker than a piece of paper? Since it has more earth in it. Aristotle could even clarify natural phenomena. For what reason does rainfall from the sky to the ground? For what reason do volcanoes shoot fire up? Clearly, this isn't the manner by which gravity works, yet it's a method of clarifying it that sounded good to the Ancient Greeks. Where Plato saw a universe of ideal shapes, Aristotle had a hypothesis that recognized that all of us are somewhat of a chaotic situation, something that is imperfect. Things are normally muddled up, however continually attempting to return to their fundamental spot. Again emphasizes that he is a realist, he has faith in the local defect of nature and the consistent battle to arrive at the ideal state.
You see the Ancient philosophers tried their best to reach answers they could explain nature with. And most of their results were proved wrong later on, but that doesn’t mean they were useless. These thinkers make a kind of a firm footing for the next ones to form newer and better guesses. Can you believe not only did Aristotle come up with a complete theory of everything, but he also wrote it down? He was a prolific author, and a significant percentage of his texts have survived thanks to our Arabian scholars. Almost all of his works cant be confirmed scientifically, but he gave us more useful things than correct answers, a way to think, and a way to learn.
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