Terms. The word science has no exact equivalent in the ancient Greek language. Instead, the Greeks generally used rather broad terms like philosophia (love of wisdom) and episteme (knowledge) to describe the investigation of nature. The sorts of things included in ancient scientific research were equally broad and crossed over into categories that the modern world usually does not consider part of true science at all.

Speculation. Most of the things we now identify as essential for scientific activity are absent from the history of ancient thought. Relatively few examples can be found of Greek thinkers engaging in forming hypotheses, constructing experiments, conducting careful research guided by rigorous methods, keeping detailed records, or proposing and testing and retesting theories. With only occasional exceptions, much of what the Greeks did often seems to a modern reader like pure speculation at best, unsupported by any real scientific methods and procedures...