It's really fascinating to read historical accounts of science. Cicero's De Natura Deorum has an incredible account various antique world views and how they're

It's really fascinating to read historical accounts of science. Cicero's De Natura Deorum has an incredible account various antique world views and how they're motivated. Most of it is wrong in some sense in the light of modern science, but what's fascinating is how often they get things right. It's like they're using poorly chosen basis vectors, and muddling some concepts we now understand to be distinct: They seem to have associated energy and/or thermodynamic heat with the element of fire; the gaseous phase with air and buoyancy, the liquid phase with water, the solid phase with earth and gravity. It's very clear why the model stood for as long as it did despite some remarkably clever people looking into it. It actually fits the empirical evidence pretty well.