What Ionia and ancient Greece provided is not so much inventions or technology or engineering, but the idea of systematic inquiry, the notion that laws of Nature, rather than capricious gods, govern the world. Water, air, earth, and fire all had their turn as candidate “explanations” of the nature and origin of the world. Each such explanation—identified with a different pre-Socratic philosopher—was deeply flawed in its details. But the mode of explanation, an alternative to divine intervention, was
