1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

292 11. The Age-Long Recovery
used on an industrial scale for the production of rose-water. 10 Agriculture,
much more advanced than it was in the Christian West at the same time,
made use of irrigation devices powered by natural energy sources. 11
Links between science and technology, often claimed to have been nonexistent
before the modern age, are clear to Arab thinkers. Ibn Sina, or
Avicenna (died 1037) lists the practical sciences that depend on geometry:
geodesy, the science of automata, the kinematics of weights, the science of
weights and balances, the science of measuring instruments, the science
of lenses and mirrors, the science of water transport. 12 Among Hellenistic
technological products that interested Arab scientists were automata (in page 362
Islam a guild of automata builders flourished for centuries 13 ) and geared
mechanisms. 14
The earliest period in Western Europe to which the name “Renaissance”
has been applied is the twelfth century. 15 It was then, for example, that
Greek scientific works were first translated into Latin. At the beginning of
the century Bernard of Chartres encapsulated his generation’s relationship
with the Ancients in a witticism destined to become very popular: “We
ourselves are dwarfs, but by standing on the shoulders of giants [who
came before us] we can see further than they.” Tellingly, the opinions of
giants studied and discussed during that time were not just those that
later came to be regarded as canonical for the whole of “Antiquity”. Thus,
William of Conches’ Dragmaticon philosophiae, written around 1140, reports
statements such as that the fixed stars have an intrinsic motion too slow
to be noticed within a human lifespan, and that the sun has an attractive
force. 16
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Iberian peninsula and Sicily,
taken back from Islam, and Southern Italy, which had stayed in contact
with Constantinople all along, were important meeting points between
European culture and the scientific tradition that went back to Hellenistic
times. In the states arising from the Reconquest it was in fact possible to
find Hellenistic works and Arab scholars able to understand their content,
10 [Holmyard], p. 49.
11 For the diffusion in Islam of wind mills and water wheels (Bassora even boasted a tide mill),
see, for example, [Hill: E], pp. 780–784.
12 Avicenna, Resā ‘il fī ‘l-hikmet (Treatise on wisdom), Constantinople, Y.H. 1298, p. 76. The passage
is quoted, translated and discussed in [Philo/Carra de Vaux], p. 13.
13 For the Arabic tradition of building “marvelous mechanisms”, which goes back to the eighth
century, see [Hill: MAS].
14 Price has remarked on the close affinity between the Antikythera machine (Section 4.8) and a
similar mechanism described by al-Bīrūni around 1000 A.D. ([Price: Gears], pp. 42–43).
15 The notion of a “twelfth century Renaissance” was discussed in [Munro], and more extensively
in [Haskins].
16 William of Conches, Dragmaticon philosophiae, III, IV.
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20