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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

"I would rather discover a new aetiology than acquire the Persian crown." - Epicurus

“In physics, where he is the most pretentious, Epicurus is a perfect stranger. Most of it belongs to Democritus; where he deviates from him, where he endeavours to improve, he spoils and worsens it.” - Cicero

“Of this great man [Democritus] we scarcely know anything but what Epicurus borrowed from him, and Epicurus was not capable of always taking the best.” - Leibniz

Epicurus' philosophy very much reminds me of Goethe's regarding perception of colors (contrasted with the objective position of Newton regarding colors). As I am aging I am becoming convinced that the experience is the meaning, and youthful insistence on "meaning of life" is precisely pre-mature. (And as a Persian, I think he also made the right call regarding the crown of Persia ..)

[The quotes are taken from Karl Marx's school thesis btw.]

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Except that it's the Epicureans that got the closest to modern scientific knowledge in hindsight.

Lucretius's De Rerum Natura is the only extant work from antiquity to explicitly describe the claim that what we see around us started from senseless primordial beings that through intermediate mutants came to be what we see around us via the process of survival of the fittest in relation to reproduction.

It also claimed that trait inheritance occurred as the result of a "doubled seed" from each parent.

It theorized that quantized matter must be governed by a degree of uncertainty in outcomes for free will to exist ("the swerve").

That light was also quantized and what we see is the result of these quantized parts moving very quickly.

That thunder and lighting might occur at the same time but one moves faster to reach us.

That the entire world was the result of primordial quanta randomly interacting.

That this was not the only world like it, but was one of an uncountable number of worlds all from this random process.

So that's great that a bunch of idiots in antiquity who had no idea what was actually correct thought that Democritus was superior (who they also claimed was just ripping off Mochus of Sidon) and Epicurus the lesser. But their opinions are hardly authoritative given they would have also claimed most of the above wasn't true.

The Epicurean understanding of nature was outstanding in retrospect with the exception of his local cosmology.

But then who among Ancient Greek philosophers was good at physics? They only tried to explain, that is, tell stories about how things worked. They did not try to make predictions and verify that they matched the reality.

There is no physics in Liberal Arts but there were Geometry, Music, Astronomy - some parts of which are parts of what today is called Physics. All I know about pure Physics in Ancient times is Zeno's paradoxes which is how they used to analyze movement and maybe three Archimedean simple machines among the 6 classical ones which is how they applied their knowledge about movement into practice.

Epicurus.

The comment above is using the quotes of people who didn't understand modern science ('physics' meant the study of nature) to dismiss the guy who in retrospect was the closest to modern science.

For example, Lucretius (the Epicurean poet) nailed survival of the fittest and roughly described Mendelian trait inheritance nearly two millennia before Darwin.

But I very much doubt Cicero or even Leibniz would have recognized that as a correct understanding of nature.

Even Epicurus just tried to explain according to his surviving works.

As for Lucretius preceding Darwin by 2 millennia, then consider that the idea of survival of the fittest by itself is not a scientific theory in the modern sense that makes predictions that can be verified. Basically one can explain anything with it by defining what “fittest” means post-factum. The science begins when one tries to predict with it things like speed of evolution or the existence of species not yet observed in paleontological records. There is nothing like that in Lucretius works AFAIK.

What was meant by Epicurus is a perfect stranger in physics? Does it mean he didn't interact with other physicists? Was physics something different 2000 years ago?

I think it just means he was really bad at it.

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