1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

344 11. The Age-Long Recovery
Each of the renaissances discussed in Section 11.1 led to a partial replacement
of earlier works on technical subjects by new works — in many cases
of lower level; this sometimes limited the diffusion of the older works, and
sometimes led to their complete disappearance. In imperial times, Heron’s
work on automata displaced Philo’s and caused its disappearance. The re- page 421
covery of ancient knowledge about refraction seems to have spelled, in the
early seventeenth century, the end of Ptolemy’s Optics. 166 Gilbert’s treatise
made obsolete the earlier work of Pierre de Maricourt (Petrus Peregrinus)
on magnetism and the compass; 167 one may suspect that the latter, in turn,
had contributed to the loss of older works on the subject. 168
But in none of these situations had it been denied or questioned that the
study of ancient Greek sources was, in their sum, essential. Admiration
for ancient science was imparted, unabated, by the writers of the imperial
period to Byzantium and the Arabs; it revived in late medieval Europe in
the passionate pen of Roger Bacon, 169 and continued to be shared by such
men as Della Porta, Francis Bacon, Galileo and Newton.
In the eighteenth century something radically different took place. For
the first time it was again possible to build coherent theories, which could
be expected to evolve solely through the light of reason, without essential
and constant recourse to poorly understood ancient sources. European
science, confident of finally being able to walk on its own legs, underwent
during the Enlightenment a phase of violent rejection of the old culture
that had nurtured it, obliterating its memory. It was then that it came to be
believed that pneumatics started with Torricelli, and the works of Heron
and Philo of Byzantium fell into the oblivion in which they pretty much
remain. 170 It was then that heliocentrism became “Copernican”, for earlier
it had always been linked with its creator, Aristarchus — as when Gilles page 422
de Roberval apocryphally published his book in defense of heliocentrism
as if authored by the Greek astronomer (Aristarchi Samii de mundi systemate
partibus. . . , Paris, 1644), or when Libert Fromond published a refuting tract
166
The ancient work was cited for the last time, by Ambrosius Rhodius, in 1611, and after that
was considered lost.
167
Gilbert’s famous De magnete. . . (London, 1600), as the author acknowledges, owes much to
Pierre de Maricourt’s 1269 epistolary tract, which had until then been popular in manuscript
(“Tractatus de magnete Peregrini de Maricourt ad Sygerum militem”) and in print (De magnete,
seu Rota perpetui motus, Augsburg, 1558; a truncated edition had appeared in the 1510s under the
title De virtute magnetis, misattributed to Raymond Lull).
168
In the thirteenth century, theoretical knowledge about magnetism and the compass was shared
by other authors such as Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. The compass — but not its use in
navigation — is attested in China in the first century A.D.
169
See Section 4.10.
170 See, for example, [Philo/Prager], p. 31.
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20