What could the ancient-Greek approach reveal, using our hindsight?

stuartmacg said:

I saw a post on Quora recently, about Epicurus and his argument for the existence of indivisible atoms. The logic was faulty sadly.

Could we, with modern knowledge of what there is, come up with ancient Greek style arguments - going from every day observations, without microscopes or telescopes etc., to demonstrate the existence of anything interesting that the Greeks could have come up with?

The only idea I have come up with so far is: - The replication of objects we call life could only happen if some rigid (but occasionally altering) template exists, presumably at a small scale, for each object type. "Thus" the only universe which can evolve life must have small rigid duplicated objects.

Well, I tried, your turn :-).

• atoms are needed to stop having infinite infinitesimal bits each with positions etc.
• “elements” or indeed sub atomic building blocks are desirable to limit the otherwise indefinite variability of stuff.
• you get an infinite sequence of positions of anything in motion, if you can (in theory) observe positions at infinitesimal time intervals. If you cannot do this, then you cannot estimate speed and time together to unlimited accuracy i.e. the Heisenberg uncertainty principle must appear at some scale.

stuartmacg said:

Could we, with modern knowledge of what there is, come up with ancient Greek style arguments - going from every day observations, without microscopes or telescopes etc., to demonstrate the existence of anything interesting that the Greeks could have come up with?

stuartmacg said:

Sorry if you are offended.