Before Galileo

August 6, 2012
Freely makes the surprising case for modern science’s origins during the Dark Ages, centuries before Galileo and the scientific revolution. With the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in 48 B.C.E., original works from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and others were lost to the Western world. Fortunately, some secondhand copies and other fragments survived in the possession of scholars outside Alexandria; preserved in monasteries across western Europe, the materials also excited further study when, after 762 C.E., they reached the Arab world of the Abbasid caliphate. Freely explains how, despite the opinion of many medieval Christian scholars that the study of science was unnecessary—“for in order to save one’s soul, it is enough to believe in God”—translations into Latin by clergymen-scholars like Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Gerard of Cremona disseminated ancient Greek and more contemporary Arab ideas, heavily influencing medieval thinkers. Thus, reintroduction of Aristotle’s cause-and-effect reasoning forced scholars like Thomas Aquinas to walk “a tightrope to avoid conflict with Church dogma,” but from Bologna to Oxford secular universities began to flourish, nourishing the roots of what became Roger Bacon’s “scientific method” and Copernicus’s heliocentric solar system. Freely’s argument isn’t entirely convincing, but he does provide a detailed look at the lineage and transmission of scientific thought from the Greeks through the medieval era. Agent: Derek Johns, AP Watt Ltd. (U.K.).