Unit 8: The Greeks and Matter

Preparation

• History Web Lecture: The Greek philosophers were the first people in the western tradition to work on the idea of abstracting essentials from individual instances of things, such as the roundness from balls, and to apply the idea that characteristics of roundness learned from studying balls could be applied to other round objects as well. This idea of abstraction is essential to science; without it, we cannot make general rules about the behavior of similar things.
• Science Web Lecture: All the properties listed apply to matter, but different types of matter have different characteristics. All matter has mass, but not all matter has ductility in any measurable quantity. Help the student distinguish between characteristics that establish essential type (all balls are round) and characteristics that establish individual identity (this ball is blue, that one spotted). The Greeks revolutionized the ancient world's way of thinking by making this distinction.
• Homework: The Mastery Exercise focusses on identifying each scientist or philosopher with the concepts they explained or discoveries they made; these facts are the basic components of the history of science and the theories themselves. Any generalizations we make about the progress of science or its reception has to be grounded in actual events.
• Discussion: Our main focus will be on realizing the distinctions between different concepts of matter, and the characteristics that modern physics and chemistry use to describe matter and its properties.

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