Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevailing narrative in the history of science maintains that the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of a 'law of nature'. This paper overturns that narrative and shows that some ancient Greek philosophers did have an idea of laws of nature and, moreover, they referred to them as 'laws of nature'. This paper analyzes specific examples of laws of nature in texts by Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Nicomachus of Gerasa, and Galen. These examples emerged out of the closely intertwined Platonic and Pythagorean traditions, and these philosophers' texts make reference to laws of nature when describing arithmetical methods, arithmological doctrines, or medical theories. Nicomachus' laws of nature are especially noteworthy, because they have features that historians look for in the search for the origin of the modern concept of laws of nature. Nicomachus' laws of nature are mathematical, universal, and necessary. This paper raises the possibility that the ancient Platonic and Pythagorean traditions influenced the subsequent development of the idea of laws of nature in medieval and early modern Europe, including the conception of laws of nature deployed by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".