Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700

Book excerpt: "Historical scholarship in the last half-century has found the origins of modern science long before the so-called Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, has demonstrated in fact that the modern science of the West began in the thirteenth century withe the Western response to the new Latin translations from Greek and Arabic. Dr. Crombie has shown in this study that the outstanding contribution of the natural philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the Western scientific tradition was their understanding of the systematic use of experiment in scientific investigation and explanation. This contribution marks one of the great stages in the history of science, comparable with the development of geometry by the Greeks and of the mathematics of motion in the seventeenth century. Uniting Greek geometrical methods with the practical tradition of Western and Arab technology, Western scholars, beginning with Robert Grosseteste and his followers in Oxford, systematically developed methods of induction and experimental verification and falsification which have remained a permanent part of scientific procedure. The book begins with a sketch of the philosophical and technological background to thirteenth-century science. It goes on to give a detailed analysis of Grosseteste's ideas on the logic of science and the development of these ideas in Oxford from Roger Bacon to William of Ockham and Thomas Bradwardine. Then follows an account of the influence of Oxford ideas on scientific method in Paris and other continental centres. Examples are given of the use of the new experimental method in investigating concrete problems. especially in optics, astronomy, and magnetics. The theory of the rainbow, first attempted by Grosseteste and successfully advanced in the essentials detail. The book concludes by tracing the influence of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writings on the rainbow and on the nature of light down to Descartes and Newton, and the influence of the writings on scientific method down to Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton."- Publisher