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Ideas in a thirteenth-century treatise on the nature of matter still resonate today, say Tom C. B. McLeish and colleagues.
A paper called "De Luce" (On Light), written in 1225 in Latin and dense with mathematical thinking, explores the nature of matter and the cosmos. Four centuries before Isaac Newton proposed gravity and seven centuries before the Big Bang theory. To our knowledge, De Luce is the first attempt to describe the heavens and Earth using a single set of physical laws. Implying, probably unrealized by its author, a family of ordered universes in an ocean of disordered ones, the physics resembles the modern 'multiverse' concept.
This may be of special interest to those learning of the history of the universe on "Cosmos", which covers other famous historical thinkers.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2014, @01:04AM
I thought samzenpus at slashdot was the lowest of the low. Soylent, you keep this shit up, and ... well, never mind.
(Score: 3, Informative) by black6host on Monday April 28 2014, @01:40AM
By the way, the author of the paper was English scholar Robert Grosseteste. Kind of missing from the summary if one is to compare to another scholar who is named (Newton.) Attribution is a nice gesture :)
(Yes, read TFA and you'll find out but still something like that should be front and center IMO.)
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday April 28 2014, @02:49AM
You're correct. Putting together a perfect summary is difficult though, and I think I did this fairly late at night. He was apparently a brilliant man. It seems he went extremely far with very little existing knowledge to base his theories on. Up until some recent modern ideas though, he was probably thought to be nuts, otherwise we'd probably have heard of him before.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday April 28 2014, @04:06AM
Yes, one does not just simply walk into a Medieval Multiverse Theory! Especially if you have to really stretch the illumination to make it fit. But no matter. Grosseteste, or in modern terms, Gross Testes. No wonder people may have thought he was nuts. English, you know.
(Score: 2) by starcraftsicko on Monday April 28 2014, @04:42AM
Grosseteste, or in modern terms, Gross Testes.
I believe the correct translation is 'Giant Balls', though I am worried that the plural may not be quite right.
This post was created with recycled electrons.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday April 28 2014, @08:21AM
Perhaps you are right, the singular would be "teste"? Or maybe not, these things tend to make me "testy", or prone to irrational irritation about speculative theories that I put forth in the second century, or thereabouts.
(Score: 1) by EvilJim on Wednesday May 14 2014, @03:39AM
a gross is 12 dozen, that would be 144 balls. not bad...
(Score: 2) by black6host on Monday April 28 2014, @08:06AM
Indeed, a good summary is/can be a bit of work. Certainly wasn't meant as a personal attack. And thanks for the submission. I learned another interesting thing today.
Actually I wrote a journal entry on this very subject (the difficulty of writing good submissions.)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2014, @08:16AM
The most incredible thing in the article is that you needed modern computers to actually simulate the thing, and yet they found that, with the right parameter set, you indeed get exactly the universe he wanted to describe with it. Despite the fact that he had no modern computers to test it for himself.
Also, you need some fine-tuning of parameters to get that finite number of spheres, rather than a chaotic universe or infinitely many spheres. Which is also quite a nice parallel to modern theories where we also have such a fine-tuning problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ls671 on Monday April 28 2014, @10:48AM
Back then, they had all kind of neat devices, crystal balls etc. so you didn't even need to run a simulation!
Nowadays, we are stuck with second grade computing devices with crummy user interfaces ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Monday April 28 2014, @12:20PM
How dare you say that about my Apple II and Oregon Trail!!!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 28 2014, @12:25PM
Before you get all excited, just realize that
"resembles the modern 'multiverse' concept"
merely means there exist no experimental results, and no theoretically falsifiable testable experiments related to the theory. Nothing grand or amazing or interesting.
The modern multiverse cult is the "intelligent design" theory applied to physics for exactly the same reason ID is applied to bio. "We're not going to say the bible should be taught in cosmology class, but if we first agree the scientific method is invalid and can be ignored or laughed at, then why not just skip all this science stuff and just read the bible in cosmology class? If the bible is a "better" story (more racism, more sex, more violence, more sexism, more classism, more homophobia, less freedom, at least compared to most multiverse daydreams I've seen) why not stick with the "better" story?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2014, @03:37PM
There is a big, big difference between wrong and unfalsifiable. ID is wrong, but you can't say ID is unfalsifiable. It's falsified by all of evolutionary biology.
(Score: 2) by elf on Monday April 28 2014, @03:32PM
I am sure this guy was a brilliant man but as a lot of historians do they have taken information from hundreds of years ago and applied conclusions using today's knowledge. And by doing this they are very generous on their interpretations.