Aristotle called the earlier Greek philosophers physiologi, and this is sometimes translated as “physicists,”14 but that is misleading. The word physiologi simply means students of nature (physis), and the early Greeks had very little in common with today’s physicists. Their theories had no bite. Empedocles could speculate about the elements, and Democritus about atoms, but their speculations led to no new information about nature—and certainly to nothing that would allow their theories to be tested.
