1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

302 11. The Age-Long Recovery
Despite all these advances, the general picture remained prescientific.
Specific scientific results were grasped from Greek or Arabic manuscripts,
but not the methodology that had led to them. The study of Hellenistic
books brought with it the rediscovery of elements of exact science and
technology, of anatomy, of philology and even the possibility of ocean voyages,
thus putting Europe on the route to modern civilization, but the conceptual
framework was sought in the “Ancients” as a whole. Neo-Platonist
and neo-Aristotelian schools were born; classical reading was put on a
pedestal, justified by theoretical reflections on the superiority of the Ancients,
all of whose writings shared the same lofty status; Pliny’s Natural
history was printed and read side by side with Hellenistic scientific works, page 373
with no awareness of the abyss that separates the two. In other words, the
Renaissance accepted the idea (born in imperial times) of a Greco-Roman
civilization that in fact confused completely different cultures.
The retrieval of Byzantine manuscripts by the West did not end when
Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453; it continued on for centuries. We
mentioned on page 193 the importance for philology of the eighteenthcentury
find of ancient scholia to the Iliad in a codex preserved in Venice.
Besides this city, which had always had special ties with Byzantium, manuscripts
could also come from regions of the Byzantine empire, such as
Dalmatia, that had been conquered by the Venetian state.
11.3 The Rediscovery of Optics in Europe
Optics was the first Hellenistic scientific theory attempted to be recovered.
The usefulness of the ancient science of perspectiva — this was the name
given in Latin to optics in the narrow sense, that is, the science of sight —
quickly became obvious, even though its first applications to painting had
to wait yet a century or so. But perspective was not all there was to it.
In Section 10.2 we mentioned the dispersion of light, an area where “ancient
science” usually gets very little credit. Since it is a common opinion
that Newton was the father of the theory of dispersion (the dependence
of a medium’s refractive index on the color of incident light), we will give
him the floor. In his Opticks, at the beginning of his explanation for the
rainbow, he writes:
. . . this Bow is made by Refraction of the Sun’s Light in drops of
falling Rain. This was understood by some of the Antients, and of
Antikythera machine; see [Price: Gears], pp. 60–61. Since today we know about the existence of
differential gears in Antiquity only from twentieth-century underwater archeology, this gives yet
another proof that the sixteenth century still knew certain things about classical technology that
were lost later.
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20