The Medieval Accomplishment in Mechanics and Optics

Abstract

The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as is commonly acknowledged, had its remote antecedents in Greek and early medieval thought. In the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries this heritage gradually took shape in a series of methods and ideas that formed the background for the emergence of modern science. The methods adumbrated were mainly those of experimentation and mathematical analysis, while the concepts were primarily, though not exclusively, those of the developing sciences of mechanics and optics. The history of their evolution may be divided conveniently on the basis of centuries: (1) the thirteenth, a period of beginnings and reformulation; (2) the fourteenth, a period of development and culmination; and (3) the fifteenth and sixteenth, a period of dissemination and transition. It is the purpose of this essay to sketch the essentials of this achievement in mechanics and optics by relating it to the philosophical setting sketched in the previous essay, and so to provide a framework in which the essays constituting the remaining parts of the volume can conveniently be located.