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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 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.