Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by n1 on Sunday April 27 2014, @11:53PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday April 28 2014, @08:21AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Monday April 28 2014, @08:21AM (#37064) Journal

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2