To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science Read Online Free PDF Page A

opposite is not self-evident. However, at first sight, this seems as much against natural reason than all or many of the articles of our faith. What I have said by way of diversion or intellectual exercise can in this manner serve as a valuable means of refuting and checking those who would like to impugn our faith by argument. 11
    We do not know if Oresme really was unwilling to take the final step toward acknowledging that the Earth rotates, or whether he was merely paying lip service to religious orthodoxy.
    Oresme also anticipated one aspect of Newton’s theory of gravitation. He argued that heavy things do not necessarily tend to fall toward the center of our Earth, if they are near some other world. The idea that there may be other worlds, more or less like the Earth, was theologically daring. Did God create humans onthose other worlds? Did Christ come to those other worlds to redeem those humans? The questions are endless, and subversive.
    Unlike Buridan, Oresme was a mathematician. His major mathematical contribution led to an improvement on work done earlier at Oxford, so we must now shift our scene from France to England, and back a little in time, though we will return soon to Oresme.
    By the twelfth century Oxford had become a prosperous market town on the upper reaches of the Thames, and began to attract students and teachers. The informal cluster of schools at Oxford became recognized as a university in the early 1200s. Oxford conventionally lists its line of chancellors starting in 1224 with Robert Grosseteste, later bishop of Lincoln, who began the concern of medieval Oxford with natural philosophy. Grosseteste read Aristotle in Greek, and he wrote on optics and the calendar as well as on Aristotle. He was frequently cited by the scholars who succeeded him at Oxford.
    In Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science , 12 A. C. Crombie went further, giving Grosseteste a pivotal role in the development of experimental methods leading to the advent of modern physics. This seems rather an exaggeration of Grosseteste’s importance. As is clear from Crombie’s account, “experiment” for Grosseteste was the passive observation of nature, not very different from the method of Aristotle. Neither Grosseteste nor any of his medieval successors sought to learn general principles by experiment in the modern sense, the aggressive manipulation of natural phenomena. Grosseteste’s theorizing has also been praised, 13 but there is nothing in his work that bears comparison with the development of quantitatively successful theories of light by Hero, Ptolemy, and al-Haitam, or of planetary motion by Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and al-Biruni, among others.
    Grosseteste had a great influence on Roger Bacon, who in his intellectual energy and scientific innocence was a true representative of the spirit of his times. After studying at Oxford,Bacon lectured on Aristotle in Paris in the 1240s, went back and forth between Paris and Oxford, and became a Franciscan friar around 1257. Like Plato, he was enthusiastic about mathematics but made little use of it. He wrote extensively on optics and geography, but added nothing important to the earlier work of Greeks and Arabs. To an extent that was remarkable for the time, Bacon was also an optimist about technology:
Also cars can be made so that without animals they will move with unbelievable rapidity. . . . Also flying machines can be constructed so that a man sits in the midst of the machine revolving some engine by which artificial wings are made to beat the air like a flying bird. 14
    Appropriately, Bacon became known as “Doctor Mirabilis.”
    In 1264 the first residential college was founded at Oxford by Walter de Merton, at one time the chancellor of England and later bishop of Rochester. It was at Merton College that serious mathematical work at Oxford began in the fourteenth century. The key figures were four fellows of the college: Thomas Bradwardine (c.