It’s science, not protest, that will save the planet

One might expect that the challenge of climate change would encourage many young people to take up Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at A-level. Yet over the past ten years, with the exception of maths, numbers have risen only very slightly; and for ICT have dropped. Ancient attitudes to what then passed as ‘science’ may suggest a solution.

Ancient Greeks were scrupulous about one fundamental breakthrough that remains the cornerstone of all serious research: supernatural explanations were impermissible. The reason was that no human could know the mind of a god. This did not mean Greek ‘scientists’ did not acknowledge the gods; they simply took it as axiomatic that bringing gods into the equation rendered the conclusions valueless.

That said, the ancients did not understand, nor practise, science in the way that we do. The experimental method had not yet been invented, let alone the technology to explore at anything but surface level. They had to rely on reasoning from what they could see with the naked eye on the strength of the data they could gather. Aristotle’s stunning classification of animal life (he identified 495 species) into a ‘nested hierarchy’ showed what could be done, effectively inventing biology.

The earliest Greek ‘scientists’ c. 600 bc speculated about how the world was made. They took it for granted that there was a basic stuff (or stuffs) from which everything else derived, and argued about what it might be and how that stuff subsequently changed into the different forms of matter that we see around us. The most dramatic claim to emerge from this chain of reasoning was made by the 5th century Athenian thinker Leucippus, who invented an atomic theory of matter, i.e. that the single basic, indivisible stuff (an atomos) existed below the level of sense-perception and created the diversity of the world we see about us by combining in different ways.