28 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
through the compulsion of strife. Homer was wrong in saying
“would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men”.
For if that were to occur then all things would cease to exist.The Heraclitean picture of the universe in which all things are in a
state of flux is rather stark and not very comforting, even though these
processes are according to him ruled by logos or reason, viz., “All things
come to pass in accordance with this logos”.
It is not surprising that a reaction to the Heraclitean point of view
developed since as stated earlier one of the aims of a worldview is to
relieve one’s anxieties about the uncertainties of the world not reinforce
it. Using for, perhaps, the first time in our intellectual history an
internally self-consistent logical argument Parmenides developed a
counterview to Heraclitean flux in which the universe was an unchanging
static unit. Parmenides argued that the concept of Non-being is logically
self-contradictory. “Non-being cannot be and therefore no change is
allowed for if a change from the state A to state B occurs then state A
will not-be. But not-being is impossible and therefore nothing changes.”
If this is true then concludes Parmenides what appears to our senses as
change must be deception and should not be trusted. With this very
simple argument Parmenides caused every subsequent Greek thinker to
question the value of the empirical approach. Parmenides views were
challenged by contemporaries who argued that his system did not allow
motion. His disciple Zeno countered their challenge with the following
proof of the non-existence of motion.
If anything is moving, it must be moving either in the place in
which it is or in a place in which it is not. However, it cannot
move in the place in which it is (for the place in which it is at
any moment is of the same size as itself and hence allows it no
room to move in) and it cannot move in the place in which it is
not. Therefore movement is impossible.Either because of their faith in empiricism was weak or because they
were so impressed by their new discovery of deductive logic, the
influence of these arguments of Parmenides and Zeno on Greek thought
was enormous. Instead of concluding that there are limitations to
deductive reasoning as is now recognized, the Greeks, by in large,
concluded that sense data could not be trusted. Anaxagoras writes
“because of the weakness of our senses we are not able to judge the