During the 300s BCE until the beginning of the first century, Greece experienced a period of scientific and artistic enlightenment. During this era of expansion and economic recovery, Greece was destined to make discoveries that would change the world forever. People like Ptolemy and Euclid made advances in mathematics with the first known table of a trigonometric function and the creation of the standard book of geometry. But the most significant advances have been made in the fields of science, medicine and astronomy. Although some of these ideas were not fully proven until the Renaissance with the scientific revolution of the 16th century, they opened the way to a new world of stability and power, unknown to anyone before that period. Few people understand the importance of the ideas and laws that are continually used today through Hellenistic science and medicine. Even simple things like a geometry book are in use today, still teaching people the same things they did hundreds of years ago. The result of scientific thinkers from Hellenistic Greece like Archimedes and Eratosthenes, medical thinkers like Herophilus and Erasistratus, and astronomers like Hipparchus and Aristarchus contributed much to the world as we know it and led to a complete shift in the understanding of the universe. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayThe era of Hellenistic science was an era full of brilliant thinkers and experimenters, but none came close to the Eratosthenes' discoveries, including his calculation of the circumference of the earth and the first map of the world. The geographer placed the sundials a hundred yards apart and used the data to calculate the Earth's circumference at nearly 25,000 miles, which was no more than 200 miles from the modern calculation. This led other scientists like Martianus to make other claims about Earth. Eratosthenes also contributed to the first map of the world. The map was the most accurate map of its time, even including degrees of latitude and longitude. His formulation of the map gave people of his time a much better idea of ​​the Earth and its geography. These two discoveries and formulations paved the way for Posidonius' calculations of the exact circumference of the Earth and for modern geography. Without his calculations, even explorers like Christopher Columbus would not have thought to venture west to find a route to India via the Atlantic Ocean. Following Eratosthenes' discoveries, the "New World" may not have been discovered, and the hundreds of explorers sailing in that direction would have had no hope of finding land to the west. Another great example of Hellenistic science and how it changed the world The scientist Archimedes, who disassociated the idea that physics was a branch of philosophy by inventing the compound pulley and formulating the law of bodies floating, which he therefore called Archimedes' principle. Through continued experimentation and trial and error, Archimedes was able to develop the compound pulley, a tubular screw for pumping water, which draws water upward as it rotates. This remarkable device gained application throughout the Hellenistic world, as it allowed water to be moved upward, a process that farmers would use for the next thousand years until the present day. Another of his memorable inventions was Archimedes' principle, or the law ofbuoyancy. He stated that any object partially or fully submerged in liquid will lose some weight, the same weight as the weight of the liquid displaced by the body. This formulation revolutionized the art of shipbuilding, providing a means to better stabilize floating vessels. The beauty of Archimedes' discoveries is that they had a direct impact on the world of his time. The compound screw allowed farmers to transport water upwards with much more ease than before. The principle developed by Archimedes provided a method for increasing ship stability and weighing irregularly shaped objects by water displacement. It even describes how ships stay above water and how submarines, in the future, will sink. Archimedes had a lasting impact on science and, although he didn't know it at the time, changed thinking about water and buoyancy and brought it up to date. In Hellenistic science, many thinkers began to rethink medicine and the functioning of the human body, particularly in science. work of Herophilus, who was the first to practice human dissection and study the function of parts of the brain as well as the arteries. After emigrating to Alexandria, he began dissecting the human bodies of executed criminals, the first to do so in collaboration with his younger contemporary Erasistratus (Pomeroy 319). In his dissections, Herophilus was able to study the anatomy of the body, which provided the first detailed description of the body and its internal workings. Among Herophilus' diagrams were detailed descriptions of the brain and arteries. In the case of the brain, he was able to distinguish its parts and the functions for which they were responsible. He discreetly differentiated between sensory and motor neurons, revealing his great understanding of the nervous system. Herophilus was able to discover that arteries contain only blood, rather than blood and air as Aristotle had suggested, and identify their function of carrying blood from the heart throughout the body. A closer look at how the body works has fueled the creation of new theories about disease. Although these discoveries were not fully appreciated until the 16th century, Herophilus was the first to begin to refute the theory of the four humors that the Church had relied on for centuries. His diagrams and studies of the brain identified completely new building blocks of the nervous system and new hypotheses about how the brain works. Importantly, his discovery of the function of the arteries laid the foundation for physicians like William Harvey of the 1500s and 1600s, who recognized the flow of blood via the heart. None of his achievements received much attention in his time; nevertheless, they have greatly improved the understanding of the human body. Another major medical scientist central to the concept of the human body was Erasistratus, who was one of the first to study physiology and continued the work of Herophilus in rejecting the idea of ​​the four humors. A contemporary of Herophilus, Erasistratus worked in Alexandria, furthering his research and discovering his own discoveries. Erasistratus was primarily a physiologist who studied the structures and functions of parts of living organisms. During his studies, he was able to discover a lot about heart valves and their function. Erasistratus' physiological studies were the first to explain the processes of digestion, respiration, and those of the vascular systems, which he used to distinguish arteries and veins (Lindberg 121). Erasistratus also believed that the arteries contained a pneuma, which stimulated the tiny particles making up thehuman body by transporting fundamental substances throughout the body (Longrigg 95). These explanations were incredibly impressive at the time; some parts still survive and are used to this day. Erasistratus, like Herophilus, opposed the humoral theory of disease, but he did so much more forcefully. He condemned bloodletting (bleeding to balance the four humors) as a remedy, an idea the world had followed for hundreds of years (Koletsis). As a result, he was criticized by many. No one at the time understood the extent of these claims, but they nevertheless changed the face of anatomy, so that scientists could no longer return to the humoral theory. All these discoveries, along with those of Herophilus, laid the foundations of physiology and anatomy. His careful dissections that he used to study the body paved the way for Galen, a physician who used them to do further investigation almost four centuries later. The fields of physics, geography and anatomy were greatly improved in the era of Hellenistic science, but more major discoveries were made in astronomy, notably by the astronomer Hipparchus. This remarkable man devoted himself to mathematics and the stars, compiling a catalog of fixed stars in the sky and producing the Precession of the Equinoxes. Using his findings and those of astronomers before him, Hipparchus was able to determine more than 850 fixed stars that did not visibly move in the night sky, such as the North Star Polaris (Heath 52). Not only was this a major achievement in 129 BCE, but he was the first to create a star map. His work helped many sailors navigate, providing them with a way to determine their direction. Additionally, one of Hipparchus' greatest achievements was the development of the precession of the equinoxes, which is the phenomenon of rotation of the sky (Heath 52). While creating his star catalog, he noticed that the positions of the stars were offset from earlier measurements, indicating that it was not the stars that were moving but the Earth. This discovery of the Earth's motion allowed Hipparchus to further describe the Earth's motion in a way that had never been done before. He then established the appearance times of the major constellations for given locations and was able to determine the times of the solstices and equinoxes (Lindberg 98). These firsts opened the way for other astronomers like Ptolemy or Tycho Brahe to explain other phenomena. Ptolemy, for example, used Hipparchus's star catalogs and other of his discoveries to propose an astronomy of circles, as well as to make precise predictions of planetary positions (Lindberg 99). Like other scientists, no one in Greek society really noticed his work until the scientific revolution of the English Renaissance, so he was not celebrated in his time. Today, people have finally understood his work and astronomers honor him as the one who changed the face of the universe for eons. Finally, although no less important than Hipparchus, there is a man from Samos named Aristarchus. Sometimes called the "Hellenistic Copernicus", Aristarchus' astronomical achievements in the Hellenistic era include his work on heliocentrism and his calculations on the size of the universe. The first of its kind, his suggestion of a heliocentric system in which the earth revolves around a fixed sun attracted criticism and doubt (Lindberg 95). Although he believed he was right, no one in his time accepted his theory, because it conflicted with the ideas of Aristotle, the ideas of the Jews, and those of the Church.