Making a scientific theory is actually more difficult than you might think. The first step involves surveying what knowledge is already available. That comes in two subsets: the actual observational data and the interpretation of what everyone thinks that set of data means. I happen to think that set theory is a great start here. A set is a collection of data with something in common, together with the rule that suggests it should be put into one set, as opposed to several. That rule must arise naturally from any theory, so as you form a rule, you are well on your way to forming a theory. The next part is probably the hardest: you have to decide what interpretation that is allegedly established is in fact wrong. It is not that easy to say that the authority is wrong, and your idea is right, but you have to do that, and at the same time know that your version is in accord with all observational data and takes you somewhere else. Why I am going on about this now is I have written two novels that set a problem: how could you prove the Earth goes around the sun if you were an ancient Roman? This is a challenge if you want to test yourself as a theoretician. If you don’t. I like to think there is still an interesting story there.
From September 13 – 20, my novel Athene’s Prophecy will be discounted in the US and UK, and this blog will give some background information to make the reading easier as regards the actual story not regarding this problem. In this, my fictional character, Gaius Claudius Scaevola is on a quest, but he must also survive the imperium of a certain Gaius Julius Caesar, aka Caligulae, who suffered from “fake news”, and a bad subsequent press. First the nickname: no Roman would call him Caligula because even his worst enemies would recognize he had two feet, and his father could easily afford two bootlets. Romans had a number of names, but they tended to be similar. Take Gaius Julius Caesar. There were many of them, including the father, grandfather, great grandfather etc. of the one you recognize. Caligulae was also Gaius Julius Caesar. Gaius is a praenomen, like John. Unfortunately, there were not a lot of such names so there are many called Gaius. Julius is the ancient family name, but it is more like a clan, and eventually there needed to be more, so most of the popular clans had a cognomen. This tended to be anything but grandiose. Thus for Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero means chickpea. Scaevola means “lefty”. It is less clear what Caesar means because in Latin the “ar” ending is somewhat unusual. Gaius Plinius Secundus interpreted it as coming from caesaries, which means “hairy”. Ironically, the most famous Julius Caesar was bald. Incidentally, in pronunciation, the latin “C” is the equivalent of the Greek gamma, so it is pronounced as a “G” or “K” – the difference is small and we have now way of knowing. “ae” is pronounced as in “pie”. So Caesar is pronounced something like the German Kaiser.
Caligulae is widely regarded as a tyrant of the worst kind, but during his imperium he was only personally responsible for thirteen executions, and he had three failed coup attempts on his life, the leaders of which contributed to that thirteen. That does not sound excessively tyrannical. However, he did have the bad habit of making outrageous comments (this is prior to a certain President tweeting, but there are strange similarities). He made his horse a senator. That was not mad; it was a clear insult to the senators.
He is accused of making a fatuous invasion of Germany. Actually, the evidence is he got two rebellious legions to build bridges over the Rhine, go over, set up camp, dig lots of earthworks, march around and return. This is actually a text-book account of imposing discipline and carrying out an exercise, following the methods of his brother-in-law Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, one of the stronger Roman Generals on discipline. He then took these same two legions and ordered them to invade Britain. The men refused to board what are sometimes called decrepit ships. Whatever, Caligulae gave them the choices between “conquering Neptune” and collecting a mass of sea shells, invading Britain, or face decimation. They collected sea shells. The exercise was not madness: it was a total humiliation for the two legions to have to carry these through Rome in the form of a “triumph”. This rather odd behaviour ended legionary rebellion, but it did not stop the coups. The odd behaviour and the fact he despised many senators inevitably led to bad press because it was the senatorial class that wrote histories, but like a certain president, he seemed to go out of his way to encourage the bad press. However, he was not seen as a tyrant by the masses. When he died the masses gave a genuine outpouring of anger at those who killed him. Like the more famous Gaius Julius Caesar, Caligulae had great support from the masses, but not from the senators. I have collected many of his most notorious acts, and one of the most bizarre political incidents I have heard of is quoted in the novel more or less as reported by Philo of Alexandria, with only minor changes for style consistency, and, of course, to report it in English.
As for showing how scientific theory can be developed, in TV shows you find scientists sitting down doing very difficult mathematics, and while that may be needed when theory is applied, all major theories start with relatively simple concepts. If we take quantum mechanics as an example of a reasonably difficult piece of theoretical physics, thus to get to the famous Schrödinger equation, start with the Hamilton-Jacobi equation from classical physics. Now the mathematician Hamilton had already shown you can manipulated that into a wave-like equation, but that went nowhere useful. However, the French physicist de Broglie had argued that there was real wave-like behaviour, and he came up with an equation in which the classical action (momentum times distance in this case) for a wave length was constant, specifically in units of h (Planck’s quantum of action). All that Schrödinger had to do was to manipulate Hamilton’s waves and ensure that the action came in units of h per wavelength. That may seem easy, but everything was present for some time before Schrödinger put that together. Coming up with an original concept is not at all easy.
Anyway, in the novel, Scaevola has to prove the Earth goes around the sun, with what was available then. (No telescopes that helped Galileo.) The novel gives you the material avaiable, including the theory and measurements of Aristarchus. See if you can do it. You, at least, have the advantage you know it does. (And no, you do not have to invent calculus or Newtonian mechanics.)
The above is, of course, merely the background. The main part of the story involves life in Egypt, the aanti-Jewish riots in Egypt, then the religious problems of Judea as Christianty starts.
