A、The speculations of Thales. B、The forces of electricity, magnetism, land gravity. C、Aristotle’s natural science. D、Galileo’s d

In science the meaning of the word "explain" suffers with civilization’s every step in search of reality. Science cannot really explain electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; their effects can be measured and predicted, but of their nature is no more known to the modem scientists than to Thales who first looked into the nature of the electrification of amber, a hard yellowish-brown gum. Most contemporary physicists reject the notion that man can ever discover what these mysterious forces "really" are. Electricity, Bertrand Russell says, "is not a thing, like St. Paul’s Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave. When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to tell." Until recently scientists would have disapproved of such an idea. Aristotle, for example, whose natural science dominated western thought for two thousand years, believe that man could arrive at an understanding of reality by reasoning from self-evident principles. He felt, for example, that it is a self-evident principle that everything in the universe has its proper place, hence one can deduce that objects fall to the ground because that’s where they belong, and smoke goes up because that’s where it belongs. The goal of Aristotelian science was to explain why things happen. Modem science was born when Galileo began trying to explain how things happen and thus originated the method of controlled experiment that now forms the basis of scientific investigation.