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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXIII
One area of what would become physics that developed significantly as a direct result of the translations made during the Scientific Renaissance of the twelfth century was optics. The two Islamic...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXV
At the beginning of the first episode of this series I wrote the following: In popular histories of science in Europe the history of physics is all too often presented roughly as follows, in antiquity...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXVI
In this series we have seen that various scholars over the centuries have questioned, challenged and even rejected Aristotle’s theories of free fall and projectile motion. Just as Tartaglia extended...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXVII
Regular readers of this blog will know that I challenge the big names, big events version of the history of science going into battle for the less well-known figures, who often made highly significant...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXVIII
It is one of the ironies of the history of science that Galileo’s most important and most solid piece of science writing[1], his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXX
In this episode we are going to take another look at a sixteenth century scholar, who had a profound influence on Galileo in many different ways, Guidobaldo dal[1] Monte (1545–1607). Guidobaldo was...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXXI
In the last episode of this series, we looked at two popular sixteenth century texts on statics, the oft published and widely read pseudo-Aristotelian Questiones Mechanicae, and Guidobaldo dal Monte’s...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXXII
As should be clear by now the renaissance in awareness and study of the works of Archimedes, which had been largely ignored in the medieval period, played a major role in the new developments in...
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXXIV
Possibly the biggest ever upheaval in the history of optics was the emergence of the telescope at the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, closely followed by that of the microscope....
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From τὰ φυσικά (ta physika) to physics – XXXV
The sixteenth century saw major changes in astronomy and in particular in cosmology. These changes was go on to have a major influence on the development of the theory of mechanics in the seventeenth...
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