Physics of the Ancient Greek Era 33
the sea. The influence of the god and hence the laws pertaining to his
worship were only local in nature. They held sway over the small
territory in which they were worshipped. With the concept of an
omnipresent God whose law applied everywhere the idea of a universal
law developed. All of the early Ionian physicist and later empiricists
were monotheistic and believed in a universal law as is illustrated by the
following quotes from Heraclitus, “All things come to pass in accordance
with this Logos” and from Anaxagoras, “And Mind set in order all that
was to be, all that ever was but no longer is, and all that is now or ever
will be.”
These fragments illustrate the intimate connection for the Greek
physicists between the belief in universal law and monotheism, which
parallels the Jewish relationship of Jehovah and the Law. The Greek
deity is usually an abstraction of reason as is illustrated by the way
Heraclitus and Anaxagoras refer to him as Logos and Mind respectively.
This was my explanation for why abstract science began in the West
as of 1974 when I first met my colleague Marshall McLuhan, an English
professor at the University of Toronto and the communications theorists
who was famous for his one-liners: “the medium is the message”, “the
global village” and “the user is the content.” McLuhan (1962 & 1964)
together with Harold Innis (1971 & 1972), whose works McLuhan built
upon, were the founders of a tradition known as the Toronto School of
Communications. The Toronto School established at the University of
Toronto in the fifties explored the ways in which media of
communication, including the alphabet, have shaped and influenced
human culture and its various social institutions. In particular, McLuhan
showed that the use of the phonetic alphabet and the coding it
encouraged led the Greeks to deductive logic and abstract theoretical
science. The tradition that began as the Toronto School of
Communication now has a much broader geographic base and has given
rise to the term media ecology (see http://www.media-ecology.org)..)
In 1974 McLuhan, having heard of my Poetry of Physics course,
invited me to lunch at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto.
He asked me what I had learned from my Poetry of Physics project.
I told him of my attempt to explain why abstract science began in the
West instead of China because of the traditions of codified law and
monotheism as I described above. McLuhan agreed with me but pointed
out that I had failed to take into account the phonetic alphabet, another
feature of Western culture not found in China, which had also