I'd like to know if we have any archeological findings related to Classical Greece (e.g. the days of Socrates, Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, Aristoteles, etc.)
We have tons of amazing temples, beautiful statues, amphorae & pottery fragments depicting various scenes from Greek myths and legends, to warfare, to the daily life of commoners, yet I find it extremely strange and disturbing that we can't find anything related to science.
Thanks!
EDIT: Thanks all for answering!
I'm dismissing texts as a reliable source of info, because no originals subsist (it's a shame they didn't use clay tablets like in Crete). So we have only copies.... of copies .... of copies, most of them "appearing" during the Late Middle Ages/Renaissance, with many containing inconsitencies (e.g. the Greek language used being sometimes too "modern".) Hence restricting the scope of my question to archaelogical findings.
The Antikithera mechanism: I think it raises more questions than it answers, such as: was it really made in Greece? Having been retrieved from a shipwreck, could it possibly be that it was imported from somewhere else (Persia/Egypt/India), and not made in Greece? As /u/SmokeyBear81 mentions, it uses the Egyptian calendar.
Moreover, it was only discovered in the last century... Does this mean that historians from, e.g. the 19th century, really had no material proofs?
Klepsydras: they were invented in Mesopotamia/Persia, and the oldest klepsydra was discovered in Egypt (14th century B.C.)
I 'd consider a "valid material proof" to be, e.g. a painting/mosaic/sculpture/engraving of someone holding a scientific instrument. Or a pottery fragment with a sketch of Thales' theorem on it.
If the Mayas and the Indians had no problems engraving their temples with numbers, then why can't we find something similar for the Greeks? There must be something.
By using the term "archaeological findings," you seem to be excluding the literary record. In fact, there's a huge and significant trove of ancient Greek literature on the topics you've enumerated in your list, and these resources continued to inform the study of math, science, and philosophy in the greater Mediterranean up through the modern period.
Edit: typo
To build on what Cloissa said (because he's totally right), a lot of the objects you might be asking about are talked about a lot in those very texts. There are pages and pages of engineering and scientific treatises that deal with all sorts of issues and detail devices used in those practices. Things like a klepsydra, archimedes screw, cranes (very different from modern cranes), and aqueducts are based on the principles of physics and science that the ancients were well-versed in.
The problem is survival. What survives from 2000-3000 years ago? Either really big stone objects (the temples and statues you mention), tiny ceramic objects (good pottery is practically eternal... it will break but never disappear entirely), bones, and some precious metals.
"Things related to science" were likely to have used a lot of finer, more perishable elements. Any wooden components would be gone. Lots of metallic parts would have been salvaged, and the rest are likely not super durable.
So, we do have SOME things related to science. Aqueducts (look up reverse siphon engineering and the castellum aquae), archimedes screws, and klepsydrae survive in part, but a lot of the finer implements won't have survived the intervening millennia. The literature that Cloissa mentioned will tell you about a lot of them that are just no longer visible in the material record.
You'll likely be interested in the Antikythera machine/mechanism. Discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera it is mechanism made out of a few dozen bronze gears that were housed in a box and turned by a single crank. One face of the box displayed the metonic and lunar cycles to confirm the date and the other face showed the position of the moon and the sun on that date in the year according the Egyptian calendar. There are a range of dates for the Antikythera machine but ~200BC is a safe estimate for now. Many attribute the machine to Archimedes but since most of his work was lost during his death at the sack of Syracuse in 212 BC we cannot be certain.
The recovered piece is shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
and a recreation can be viewed here: