Griechische Wissenschaft Zeitlinie

About 450 or later
Proclus (Πρόκλος ο Λύκιος) the final head of Plato's Academy, said that astronomers "do not arrive at conclusions by starting from hypotheses, as is done in the the other sciences; rather, taking conclusions [the appearance of the heavens] as their point of departure, they strive to construct hypotheses from which effects conformable to the original conclusions follow with necessity" (Proclus, quoted by Duhem 1908:20). The astronomer is only interested in saving the appearance of the phenomena, and whether this conforms to reality is left to the other sciences to decide.

About 500
Metrodorus (Μητρόδωρος ο Χίος) assembles the Greek Anthology consisting of 46 mathematical problems.

517
John Philoponus determined that falling objects do so with the same acceleration, or 'impetus,' specifically opposing Aristotle's notion that the air through which a projectile moved was its motive force.

After 520
Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius wrote De consolatione philosophiae in Latin, probably the most widely read book in Europe in the Middle Ages, and translated Aristotle's logical books. "Until the rediscovery of Aristotle in the twelfth century his translations were the basic texts for all students of logic" (Park 1990:79). He also wrote a commentary on Porphyry's logic. Aside from Boethius and Augustine, students in the monasteries read Pliny's first century Historia Naturalis, Cassiodorus's sixth century encyclopedia, Isadore of Seville's sixth century Etymolagiarum, and Discorides' De Materia Medica.

About 530
Simplicius of Cilicia, in a commentary in Greek on Aristotle's writings on 'gravity', interpreted him to mean that the intensity of the tendency of bodies toward their natural place varied with their distance from that place.

About 800
Jabir ibn Hayyan, later known as Geber, was educated reading translations from Greek and based his chemical system "on two substances: sulphur, which...is hot and dry, and mercury, which is cold and wet. Since each contains all four elements, any other material can be formed by the proper combination of these two, and since we cannot know substance but only form, our search must aim at the most desired product, gold" (Park 1990:115). This is the most perfect, most virtuous product since, as Aristotle said, all things, even base metals, struggle upward.

About 850

Abu Yusek Yacob ibn Ishak al-Kindi commented on Aristotle and wrote numerous treatises on optics, perspective, and medicine.

About 900
Abu Bakr al-Razi, better known as Rhazes, distinguished smallpox from measles in the course of writing several medical books in Arabic. Holding against any sort of orthodoxy, particularly Aristotle's physics, he maintained "the conception of an 'absolute' time, regarded by him as a never-ending flow" (Pines 1975:125).

About 1000

Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, hypothesized two causes of mountains: "Either they are the effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard.... It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size" (Toulmin and Goodfield 1965:64). In Kitah al-Shifa, he denied the Aristotelian notion that an object thrown through the air is pushed by that air and held that "every motion occurs through a power in the moving object by which it is impelled" (Avicenna, quoted in Pines 1975:141). He also published Al-Quanun, or Canon of Medicine, where he held that medicines were to be known either by experiment or by reasoning.

About 1000

Ibn al-Haitham, or al-Hazen, in Opticae Thesaurus, introduced the idea that light rays emanate in straight lines in all directions from every point on a luminous surface. He also discussed spherical and parabolic mirrors and was aware of spherical aberration. In Epitome of Astronomy, he took a position against Ptolemy, insisting that the hypothetical spheres corresponded "to the true movements of really existing hard or yielding bodies [and] so...were accountable to the laws of physics" (Duhem 1908:28). This led to disagreements that persisted through the twelfth century.

About 1126

Adelard of Bath translated Euclid's Elements and al-Kwarizmi's arithmetic and astronomical tables from Arabic into Latin.

After about 1150
Ibn Rushd, better known in Latin Europe as Averroës, and also sometimes as the Commentator, wrote commentaries on several of Aristotle's books where he explained that prime matter, matter at its most fundamental level, has no form of its own. Its essence is its potential. He also criticized the artificiality of Ptolemy's orbits: "Astronomers propose the existence of these orbits as if they were principles and then deduce conclusions from them" (Averroës, quoted by Duhem 1908:30).

1175
Gerard of Cremona had translated from Arabic into Latin most of Aristotle's work as well as Ptolemy's Almagest, Autolycus of Pitane's De spera mota, Avicenna's Canon, al-Kindi's treatise on optics, and some of Rhazes' medical books.

About 1185
Burgundio of Pisa translated from Greek into Latin various treatises by Galen and Aphorisms by Hippocrates of Cos.

About 1190
Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, wrote The Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic for Arabic-speaking Jews and included his ideas about astrological systems. For sublunar physics, he accepted the word of Aristotle as wholly true: This is man's sphere. But the heavens are the 'deity's,' and therefore man cannot know them, but can only try to describe them "rely[ing] on the arrangement postulating the lesser number of motions" (Maimonides 1963:274), reiterating Ptolemy and Proclus.

1206
al-Jazari published a book in which he demonstrated some understanding of the use of a crank for producing reciprocal rotary motion. "No secure evidence evidence for it is found in Europe earlier than c. 1405" (White 1962:111). The crank had been understood at least as early as Archimedes, but presumably forgotten in the Dark Ages.

About 1215
Robert Grosseteste "made the first thorough logical analysis of the inductive and experimental procedures of practical science" (Crombie 1953:35). He called for investigation of effects leading to discovery of causes followed by demonstration of how causes produce effects, i.e., resolutio and compositio, Aristotle's double movement. But since this only provided a possible cause, at the end of compositio, a process of experimental verification and logical falsification is required. Grosseteste considered light to be the basis of all natural causes so he considered optics the basis of all explanation: He not only attempted mathematical explanations of the properties of mirrors and lenses, rainbows and refraction, but also to explain the rectilinear propagation of light as a succession of waves. "He was the first medieval writer to discuss these subjects systematically" (Crombie 1953:116). He also translated from Greek into Latin part of Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo et Mundo.

1217
Michael Scot translated into Latin Averroës' commentaries on Aristotle as well as some texts of Aristotle's. Probably later, he gave the University of Salerno recipe for anesthesia as equal parts opium, mandragora, and henbane. He also wrote a treatise ascribing to each of the practical sciences a corresponding theoretical science of which it is the manifestation.

About 1230
Vincent of Beauvais compiled about six thousand folio pages in an encyclopedia, Speculum majus, of knowledge gleaned from translations of Greek and Arabic books on philosophy, science, and mathematics.

[Throughout the Middle Ages there were various schools of thought about the Aristotelian system of the universe. Among the Franciscans at Oxford, there were two schools. Most accepted only some explanations of natural phenomena such as the movement of heavenly bodies. Others, such as Roger Bacon, were less offended by pagan metaphysics and had great interest in Aristotelian medicine, physics, and mathematics. At the University of Paris, there were also two schools. Dominicans, such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, accepted most Aristotelian principles, except for determinism. The other school of thought, represented by Siger de Brabant, accepted an entirely deterministic interpretation of the universe. At Montpellier in the south of France and at the Italian universities, Salerno, Padua, and Bologna, theological matters counted for less and Aristotle and the Arabs were studied mainly for medical learning (Crombie 1952:41).]

About 1250
Albert of Bollstadt, called Albertus Magnus, in De Vegeabilibus et Plantis, a commentary on a pseudo-Aristotelian plant book, shows "a sense of morphology and ecology unsurpassed from Aristotle and Theophrastus to [Andrea] Cesalpino" (Crombie 1952:204). Probably following this, Albertus wrote De Animalibus, a commentary on three treatises of Aristotle as well as commentaries on Avicenna's Canon and some of Galen's works.

About 1260
Campanus of Novara, chaplain to Pope Urban IV, writes on astronomy and publishes a Latin edition of Euclid's Elements which became the standard Euclid for the next 200 years.

1267 and 1268
Bacon published proposals for educational reform, arguing for the study of nature, using observation and exact measurement, and asserting that the only basis for certainty is experience, or verification. In a book on optics, he noted that the maximum altitude of the bow, reached when the sun is on the horizon, is 42 degrees He considered the speed of light to be finite and that it is propagated through a medium in a manner analogous to that of sound. He wrote a Greek grammar and also noted that the power of the new explosive powder "would be increased by enclosing it in an instrument of solid material" (Crombie 1952:192).

1269
William of Moerbeke translated from Greek into Latin Archimedes' On Plane Equilibriums and De lis quae Humido Vehuntur. Earlier, after 1260, he had translated Hero of Alexandria's Catoptrica.

1328 or earlier
Ockham, in Summa Logicae, wrote that universals exist only in men's minds and in language, disputing the Aristotelian principle that such things as the final cause were self-evident or necessary. In other words, facts could only be correlated, not caused. Preferring the notion of 'intuition,' he also denied the efficacy of reason in matters of faith and thus the self-evidence of Christian theological principles, such as the existence of God. He also elevated Aristotle's and Grosseteste's pragmatic economic principle, or lex parsimonae, into the cornerstone of his methodology, known as 'Ockham's razor:' What can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more.

1343
Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides) writes De harmonicis numeris (Concerning the Harmony of Numbers), which is a commentary on the first five books of Euclid.

About 1350
Jean Buridan extended Philoponus's idea by specifying the nature of 'impetus,' that is, the motive power which the agent gives to the moving body which would maintain it at a constant velocity were it not for air resistence and natural gravity. In falling bodies, the impetus, which is analogous to Isaac Newton's 'momentum,' was gradually increased by the accelerating force of natural gravity. In each case, Buridan is arguing against theories of Aristotle's largely on the basis of experience.

Probably before 1361
Nicole Oresme, in his chief work, associated continuous change with a geometric diagram and revived the Greek use of a coordinate system to represent it. Although he to algebra the conception of a fractional power, in his graphs there is no systematic association of an algebraic relationship. In De Configurationibus Intensionum, he a geometric proof to the Mertonian Rule, namely, in a given time the space traversed by a body with uniformly 'difform,' or accelerating, velocity is equal to the total time multiplied by the mean velocity. He also disposed of an argument against the earth's rotation by pointing out that is "if a man in the heavens, moved and carried along by their daily motion, could see the earth distinctly..., it would appear to him that the earth is moving in daily rotation" (Oresme 1968:523). It should be noted that Oresme, Buridan, and Albert of Saxony, who each observed the same rule of procedure, namely, that "all the facts of experience...are brought to bear on [their hypotheses]," were at the University of Paris (Duhem 1908:60).

1410
Benedetto Rinio published a herbal which contained 450 paintings of plants, botanical notes, citations of authorities used, and the names of the plants in various languages including Greek and Arabic.

About 1431
Nikolaus von Cusa established by internal evidence that the document known as the Donation of Constantine, for at least six hundred years the foundation of the Pope's political claims, could not have had the antiquity it purported.

1440

Cusa, in De docta ignorantia, said that the Truth can neither be increased nor diminished and that Intellect, or Reason, can never completely comprehend Truth. But "the more deeply we are instructed in this ignorance, the closer we approach the truth" (Cusa 1440:53). This is at the same time NeoPlatonist mysticism and post-Scholastic Humanism. Instead of the opposition between physics and astronomy, he set up an opposition "between the absolute physics of real essences and genuine causes and the relative and developing physics of abstract essences and fictive causes" (Duhem 1908:58). Revivng Platonic arithmology, Cusa "again associated the entities of mathematics with ontological reality and restored the cosmological status which Pythagoras had bestowed upon it" (Boyer 1949:90). In other words, he viewed mathematics as independent of the evidence of the senses. This encouraged the conceptual possibility of the infinite and the infinitesimal, which had been inimical to the Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages. Cusa held that "a finite intelligence can approach the truth only asymptomatically[; i.e., the infinite was] the unattainable goal of all knowledge" (ibid.:91). He compared man's search for the truth to the squaring of the circle, which, indeed, he attempted by treating the circle as a polygon with an infinite number of sides. This was later named the 'exhaustion method.'

1463
Marsilio Ficino finished the first complete translation of Plato's dialogues into Latin. His NeoPlatonism emphasized the conception that opposites are reciprocal, e.g., the higher actively strives for the lower, and that matter is not the mere opposite of form, i.e., evil, but the beginning of active form. Earlier, about 1460, Ficino had interrupted this labor to translate a newly discovered manuscript, the Pimander, which was purported to contain the 4000 year old wisdom and magic of Hermes Trismegistus. This meant that it was the Egyptian source of Plato's learning as well as being a prefigurement of Christian theology.

Between May of 1449 and August 1450
employing bombards, "siege guns put together like beer barrels out of forged iron staves reinforced by hoops [which] fired stone projectiles up to thirty inches in diameter and weighing in excess of 1500 pounds," the French liberated seventy English-held castles, ending the Hundred Years War. Key to bombards was the discovery, about 1420, that when gunpowder was mixed with water it dried in grains which burned faster and was more powerful. In 1453, Turks used a huge bombard to reduce and capture Constantinople, sending "reverberations across the West so profound that [that year] is often called the end of the Middle Ages" (O'Connell 2002:115-116).

1472
Peurbach publishes Theoricae Novae Planetarum (New Theory of the Planets). He uses Ptolemy's epicycle theory of the planets but believes they are controlled by the sun.

About 1482
Leonardo da Vinci began his notebooks in pursuit of evidence that the human body is microcosmic, which, by 1510-1511, included dissections of the human body. These notebooks, which circulated in manuscript copies, also contained his thoughts on the impossibility of perpetual motion, dynamics, statics, numerous machines, and other matters. "His devotion to the Archimedean ideal of measurement is shown by the scientific instruments which he tried to improve or devise, such as the clock, a hydrometer similar to Cusa's to measure moisture in the atmosphere, a odometer similar to Hero's to measure distance traveled, and an anemometer to measure the force of the wind" (Crombie 1952:280).

1482
Campanus of Novara's edition of Euclid's Elements becomes the first mathematics book to be printed.

1483
Theodore of Gaza translated Theophrastus's Historia Plantarum into Latin.

1494
Pacioli publishes Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita which is a review of the whole of mathematics covering arithmetic, trigonometry, algebra, tables of moneys, weights and measures, games of chance, double-entry book-keeping and a summary of Euclid's geometry.

About 1512
Nikolaus Kopérnik, better known as Copernicus, circulated a manuscript, the Commentariolus, which hypothesized that the Earth was a planet and planets revolved in circles and epicircles around the Sun, that the Earth rotated daily, and regressions in planetary orbits were explained by the Earth's motions (Park 1990:143). The problem, as he saw it, was to save the appearance of the phenomena with an hypothesis which was compatible with the principle of physics that hypotheses be founded in the truth of nature, and to demonstrate that to reject this hypothesis meant that the appearances were not saved. [It is the notion that the universe is earth- and, hence, man-centered and, therefore capable of being personalized and animated which distinguishes primitive man from civilized man.]

In the early sixteenth century
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, opposed the four humors of Galenic medicine with "a triad of chemical properties: combustibility (termed 'sulphur'), fluidity and changeability (termed 'mercury'), solidity and permanence (termed 'salt').... The medical doctrine of Paracelsus was a new humoralism, but it emphasized the use of specific medicines for specific diseases" (Fruton 1972:29). He wrote prolifically in German and his On Diseases of Miners is the earliest book on occupational diseases.

1536

Ramus says in his famous thesis 'that everything Aristotle taught is false'.

1543
Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Although he made some astronomical observations, this work is that of a mathematician using Ptolemy's data, who could read Greek and cite Aristarchus of Samos. NeoPlatonic and NeoPythagorean influences loom large: "In the center of it all rests the Sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time? As a matter of fact, not unhappily do some call it the lantern; others, the mind and still others, the pilot of the world. Trismegistus calls it a 'visible god'" (Copernicus 1543:527). In so placing the Sun, Copernicus "overthrew the hierarchy of positions in the ancient and medieval Cosmos, in which the central was not the most honorable, but, on the contrary, the most unworthy. It was, in effect, the lowest, and consequently appropriate to the Earth's imperfection. Perfection was located above in the celestial vault, above which were 'the heavens,' whilst Hell was deservedly placed beneath the surface of the Earth" (Koyré 1961:114n24).

1543
Pierre de la Ramée published two books of logic which were anti-Scholastic and anti-Aristotelian and were very influential in Protestant countries in the following century.

1551
Recorde translates and abridges the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid's Elements as The Pathewaie to Knowledge.

1576
Thomas Digges made the claim that Copernicus's 'Celestial Sphere' does not exist, that the stars are at different distances from the Earth, and that Copernicus's heliocentrism was a "most ancient doctrine of the Pythagoreans" (Digges, quoted in Nicholl 1992:207)

1578
Brahe completed the first eight chapters of De mundi aetherii recentioribus phaenomenis, a book on the comet of 1577, in which he showed that the comet "was beyond the Sun [an impossibility in the Aristotelian view] and that its orbit must have passed through the solid celestial spheres, if these existed" (Crombie 1952:314). In the ninth chapter, he offers a new system in which the Earth is immoble and the planets, except for the Earth, revolve around the Sun, thus rejecting both Ptolemy's and Copernicus's systems. This was published in 1588.

1585
Giovanni Battista Benedetti, in Diversarum speculationum, foreshadowed the inertial concept: "Every body moved naturally or violently receives in itself an impression and impetus of movement, so that separated from the motive power, it would be moved of itself in space in some time" (Benedetti, quoted in Clagett 1959:663). He studied Archimedes and applied mathematics to the study of nature.

1600
William Gilbert, in De Magnete, held that the earth behaves like a giant magnet with its poles near the geographic poles. He coined the word 'electrica' (from the Greek word for amber, elektron), and distinguished electricity from magnetism.

1608
Stevin deduced the law of the lever not merely from reasons, as Archimedes had, but from physical assumptions, or "instinctive knowledge" (Mach 1883:26-29).

1624
Pierre Gassendi , in Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, revived the "Democritean (or Epicurean) ontology,...modified [it] by doing away with the clinamen..., but...retained the essential feature, namely, atoms and vacuum" (Koyré 1968:119). He revived Hippocrates' ideas about the brain and maintained that animals have memories, reason, and other psychological characteristics of man.

1621
Bachet publishes his Latin translation of Diophantus's Greek text Arithmetica.

1648
Jean Baptiste van Helmont, in Ortus Medicinae, published posthumously, concluded that plants derive their sustenance from water, demonstrated that acid digestion was neutralized by bile thus proving that physiological changes have chemical causes, coined the name 'gas' from the Greek chaos, distinguished gases as a class with liquids and solids, and showed that metals dissolved in the three main mineral acids could be recovered.

1882
Lindemann proves that pi=3.14162... is transcendental. This proves that it is impossible to construct a square with the same area as a given circle using a ruler and compass. The classic mathematical problem of squaring the circle dates back to ancient Greece and had proved a driving force for mathematical ideas through many centuries.

Part 1

References

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History of Greek Mathematics: From Thales to Euclid

A History of Mathematics, 2nd Edition Carl B. Boyer, Uta Merzbach, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1989

Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era: A Sourcebook

The Forgotten Revolution: How Science was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn Russo Lucio, Levy Silvio (translator), Springer, 2004, IX, 487 p., ISBN: 3-540-20068-1

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