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from the month-late-reporting-on-13th-century-thought dept.
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: 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.)