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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: 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!!!