this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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That's very revisionist of you.
What we call physics today wouldn't qualify as physics in Ancient Greece, where they described how the world actually works, and not bothering with this empiricism nonsense.
It's not revisionist to say that and engineering texts are engineering texts rather than physics texts, it's just properly classifying them.
I'm not sure whether the ancient Greeks really had a concept of "physics" as a dedicated discipline like we do today- they would probably put a lot of what we do under the umbrella of "natural philosophy". The separation of pure natural science into distinct branches is a relatively recent phenomenon. The separation between pure science and engineering on the other hand is quite old.
The Greek very much had a concept of Physics.
The word physics comes from the Latin physica ('study of nature'), which itself is a borrowing of the Greek φυσική (phusikḗ 'natural science'), a term derived from φύσις (phúsis 'origin, nature, property') (Wikipedia)
Also note that Aristotelian physics was the dominant paradigm in Europe almost until Newton.
There's an argument to be had that engineering didn't exist as a science until recently. Several of the more famous engineering treatises name it as crafting.
I say we should go back to calling engineering crafting. Furthermore, physics ought to be natureken, and science ought to be worldken. We could call atomic theory uncleftish beholding.