Oh, yes, it makes sense, @Steve_Snobelen. Just for some additional points of clarity:
I certainly didn’t count the Venderable Bede as non-Catholic in my earlier posting.
I was counting these lines:
1 - Indian mathematicians;
1 - Brahmagupta;
1 - Al Khwarizmi;
1 - Chinese Alchemists;
1 - Chinese Navigators;
1 - ibn al-Haytham; and
1 - ibn Sina (Avicenna).
7 Non-Christian Innovators
As you can see, I actually under-counted in my post; I said there were only Six !
I’m not sure many of the other people in the list were the kind of thinkers that Sagan was thinking about.
From the narrative associated with the timeline, it seems Sagan was more interested in mechanicals
and gizmos… not theory or basic naturalism.
What it looks like Sagan was interested in would be the Chinese gunpower, dell’Orologio’s clockworks, Gutenberg’s printing technology and the age of discovery which, indeed, closes out Sagan’s 1000 year gap. His narrative (which I provide in the prior post) talks about steam engines and a mechanical device for calculating astronomical events. I think we could probably find mechanical innovation in the West if we try hard enough . . . but if it is found in Constantinople, that would just feed into Sagan’s bias against the limitations of the Catholic establishment, yes?
At the closing of the 1500’s, we see Italian architects, in connection with the Vatican re-invent Portland cement for construction purposes! - - a uniquely brilliant re-flowering of the old Roman days. But then the technology is forgotten yet again! It wouldn’t be until the ending decade of the 1700’s that the British re-re-invent Portland Cement … and this time for eternity!
To be precise, I don’t want you to think that I will defend Sagan’s every miss-step. I’m always aggravated when others do it, so I want to avoid that behavior as well. But every now and then, it just seems like the nay-sayers over-step a little. First Sagan is anti-Christian, and then he’s anti-Catholic. I find the latter to be more plausible, but the former is more handy when the gears start revving up on the unpleasant aspects of the New Atheists.
I think the challenge is to understand what got Sagan so aggravated… to the same extent that I have spent quite a bit
of time learning what you and @TedDavis get so aggravated about when it comes to Sagan.
At the very least, you can be confident that I will never tell the Columbus/Flat Earth story in polite company!
Steve, I want to repeat my gratitude here again for this entire thread (and your reply to me already). This is invaluable to me toward filling out a long-time goal of mine to construct a “wall of history” that chronologically encompasses my science/math classroom. I haven’t actually begun it yet other than to have my own compiled list of “who’s who”. My own list is prejudiced toward science and math thinkers, but also with an eye toward all natural philosophy in general which is a wide net to cast. My own list has initially been more of a “shotgun” approach of whoever comes to my mind or shows up frequently in various textbooks. Your list here however brings much more extensive scholarship into play helping me to fill out my list and also to prune it (DaVinci and no doubt a few others will be disappearing off mine).
My main motivation is very similar to yours except that I will unapologetically be including people like Leibniz (I teach calculus too) because I think of Newton’s turf war with him as a cautionary tale against lost opportunities. Not that Newton didn’t fare quite well apart from him of course --but had Newton not felt so hotly defensive, who knows what further refinements or even innovations he might have gleaned from taking advantage of Leibniz’s brilliant and clarifying expressions.
I’m also motivated to show the clear lesson that virtually nobody has done anything of note without first “clambering up onto the shoulders of giants” as it were. Maybe Srinivasa Ramanujan would be a good (if nearly singular?) exception to this. Speaking of him – I’m surprised your list doesn’t include him. But I think mathematicians would include him on their own somewhat course-resolution lists.
I’m also wanting to include on my own wall (for all-important context) other heavy-weight religious influencers of civilization. My very course list here will include Moses, Solomon, mention of exile (for O.T. compilation), Christ (our tectonic divider of history), Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and then mention of reformation. I know — Solomon may not have revolutionized anything, but his writings are a great way to showcase for his time the appreciation for the inner workings of nature. I’m surprised you don’t include Aquinas on your list – as a baptizer of Aristotle into Christian scholarship? I know that isn’t vindicated as an unambiguously good thing, but that was another critical juncture in western thought was it not?
And speaking of tectonics … Alfred Wegener didn’t make your list either. He was mocked for his plate-tectonic theories and of course is now totally vindicated by history.
What about Cecelia Payne (1900 - 1979). She wrote a brilliant astronomy thesis – I think I read (here on this site somewhere?) that one professional astronomer has been on record as saying her Ph.D. thesis may be the most important one ever written in astronomy. And she wasn’t immediately given as much credit for that as was her due. But it revolutionized the way cosmologists think about the universe. Is that putting it too strongly?
I hear you and share your motivation regarding women’s voices. Like you I don’t want to include them only because they’re women of course, but rather as a corrective when credit should have been given and wasn’t. I had Rosalind Franklin on my list, but hearing your comment I may re-evaluate. My wall will be crowded and I realistically may need to drop to courser resolution (which is how it will start any way).
Also what about Emmy Noether? 1882-1935. She is another one of those mathematical (and physics!) giants that, had she been a man, would easily be making the course lists. She was a brilliant teacher too (and maybe my bias toward good pedagy shows here) – but she solidly earned her place through contributions of her own. And speaking of teachers, there is another one whose name slips me at the moment (19th century I think) who’s pupils are a virtual who’s-who list of so many other people here we do have listed. I seem to remember him described as the most influential person you never heard of. Can anybody help me remember his name? I seem to remember that he may have had the most Nobel prize holders among his pupils without having a Nobel prize himself. Or something like that. I’m ashamed that I don’t have his name at hand --and a quick Google search is not yielding that to me at the moment. But (in my biased opinion) good pedagogy is an under-sung task of equipping all these to-be geniuses with ladders and better binoculars so that they can get where they are up on giant shoulders to begin their cutting edge work in the first place.
Among other modern influencers of western thought, would it be a travesty to include somebody like Thomas Huxley? He epitomizes the recent shift toward divisiveness between science and religious thought that has been a huge, if negative influence on how so many think today. He’s known for popularizing (or perhaps de-popularizing?) evolution maybe in comparable ways in which Galileo and others became cheerleaders for Copernicus. But of course Galileo had very significant accomplishments of evidence towards his ends whereas Huxley … well, he was known for working to professionalize the scientific profession by working for its independence from clerical association wasn’t he?
I guess I need to cut this long ramble short. Thanks if you have time for yet more feedback.
Another name on my preliminary list that didn’t make yours: Nicolas Steno, who (like Wegener) would probably make a geologist’s course list … but maybe not so much revolutionary in broad thought categories. I know that an unending stream of suggestions could continue, so thanks for your indulgence to those like me here who just spit out names we’ve briefly heard of or read about but who didn’t go through all the deep vetting process you did in considering all these names already.
I want to highlight what I will call “conversational narratives” through history. Real scholars may be dismayed at the oversimplifications that must follow when I try to capture a person’s major contribution in just a sound bite that fits on a timeline. “Ascribe nothing to the gods.” (A good line for Thales?) Despite the inevitable over-simplifications, I hope to capture something of the messiness of real history. I don’t intend to include inventors and technicians, but I do like running narratives like the long development of the steam engine from early but relatively unharnessed contraptions like Hero’s engine to later conceptualizations and designs (unrealized) by others, to actual building (by yet others), to improving and applying (by yet others) … all of which defies any of us to declare what one person invented the steam engine. While I don’t want to include “mere” technical application for my own timeline, I do want to capture that same messy continuity and growth of civilization-changing ideas.
Yes, well, my vote is for the integrated circuit over the microchip, but that’s just me.
Allow me to lobby for Pascal, one of the great geniuses of history. He invented the first calculating machine (surely the first step on the road to the computing machine and, eventually, the computer), syringe, and hydraulic press. He made important contributions to probability theory, geometry, fluid dynamics. And, he wrote in defense of the scientific method. I’ll leave off mentioning his non-scientific achievements, such as his influence on French literature, philosophy, and Christian apologetics.
In closing, I really don’t object too much to his being left off the list. Just had to sing Pascal’s praises for a minute cuz I love the guy!
Mervin,
Many thanks for these additional suggestions. One’s criteria for the inclusion of names will depend in part on the philosophy behind the timeline. If one wants to represent major developments instead of major innovators, then the developments would be the priority and names secondary. Thus, we could list ‘calculus’ and attach both Newton and Leibniz’s names to this. Hypatia and Da Vinci could certainly be included in a list if one of its intentions was to demonstrate what was possible at a particular point in history. Rosalind Franklin could be included in a list that was meant to get conversations started (in this case about women in science, etc). Or, if one has room to include four or five major players in the discovery of the double helix, I would definitely argue for her inclusion. Augustine, Aquinas, Huxley and even Dawkins could be included in a timeline on views of the relationship between science and religion (with Huxley and Dawkins of course being examples of promoters of the conflict thesis). I did consider Wegener as well as Steno and Ramanujan (the latter being depicted in a recent film entitled The man who knew infinity). Ramanujan was a passionate Hindu who saw his mathematical work as directly related to the divine. One of my colleagues suggested Cecilia Payne. All great suggestions–Noether as well. Many thanks!
No, you make a good point about the integrated circuit. Perhaps this is a better choice since the microchip can be seen as a subset of the integrated circuit. I give a lecture on the history of computing in my science and the media class, but I am by no means a specialist in this field. I’m open to making an adjustment on this point. It’s just that the Intel 4004 chip is so iconic. Pascal is a great candidate. He appears in no less than four of my courses, including one of my science and religion courses. I cover his calculating machine in the science and the media course, just mentioned, for instance. His fame in part lives on in the computer programming language PASCAL and the pressure unit ‘pascal’. Considering his short life, he accomplished a great deal.
Just wanted to convey my deep gratitude to @Steve_Snobelen and his colleagues in Halifax for such careful work on this timeline. Decisions of this sort are never entirely free of bias–including the bias that comes from simply being entirely or relatively ignorant of the accomplishments of individuals outside of one’s own primary areas of expertise. I can’t think of any historian of science, anywhere in the world, who has deep knowledge of the work of even a small fraction of the names on this list, let alone anything close to all of them.
As Steve said, Boyle got some consideration for inclusion–not for any fundamental scientific discoveries (he made some relatively minor ones), but for his major contributions to creating the modern laboratory and the modern scientific paper. We usually don’t think of such things as scientific discoveries, but they are, actually. His role in those stories was very significant, but others also played major roles and I don’t think Boyle’s overall contributions were comparable evenly with those of (say) Newton, Kepler, Harvey (for whom I advocated) or Galileo, if I just stick with the 17th century. However I would certainly rank him with many Nobel laureates who also didn’t make this timeline.
I’ve been using Sagan’s one-thousand year white space for years in the classroom as an example of bad history. But other historians have commented on it too. Michael Shank in his chapter “Myth 2: The the Medieval Christian Church suppressed the grown of science”, in Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion (2009), says this about the 1980 book Cosmos on page 20:
This companion to the Cosmos film series aired by PBS ends with a timeline of individuals with astronomical associations. It is famous among medievalists for covering Greek antiquity (from Thales to Hypatia), then leaving a thousand years blank and starting again with Leonardo and Copernicus.
Shanks is himself a historian of Medieval science, so it is interesting to hear him say that Sagan’s chart is famous (by which he likely means infamous) among other medievalists. (Note as well that Shank characterises the chart as being associated with astronomy, which helps explain some of the choices made and perhaps why Darwin’s name, for example, doesn’t appear; but even if dealing mostly with the history of astronomy, the white space is still far from justified). Shank continues, still on page 20:
Sagan, in turn, may have taken a cue from Henry Smith Williams’s Great Astronomers (Simon and Schuster, 1930), whose medieval chapter consists of two biblical epigraphs ascribed to an “oriental anthology” followed by several blank pages.
As childish and petty as this seems, Shanks is correct. This book can be read in a digital scan online here: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001985378
The section on Medieval Christian astronomy begins on p. 97. The blank pages follow a statement about the intolerance of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The two verses from the Bible are 1 Samuel 2:8 and Job 26:7. In case the reader missed the sarcasm of the statement and the import of the blank pages, a note at the bottom of p. 100 makes the following clarification:
The reader will note that this page, as well as the next two, are blank. This is the most graphic method the author can devise to show that, astronomically speaking, nothing happened during the Middle Ages.
The only thing that didn’t happen was the author’s research into Medieval science. Even in the 1920s enough was known to fill in those blank pages and more.
A couple weeks ago I acquired a copy of Newton’s apple and other myths about science (2015), edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis. It is similar in format to the other Harvard UP book Galileo goes to jail and I highly recommend it as well. Shanks has a chapter in it entitled: “Myth 1: That there was no scientific activity between Greek antiquity and the Scientific Revolution” – in other words, it’s about the Myth of the Medieval Gap. I am only now getting around to looking at the various chapters, although I read the titular article in draft.
I was impressed to find that in the opening of his chapter Shank refers (pp. 8-9) to both the Nobeliefs.com chart with the ‘Dark Ages’ gap that is displayed in this series, and which I first discovered and used in a conference talk in May of 2016 (and it led to some interesting discussion amongst the historians present), and Sagan’s 1980 chart. Shanks also notes something that I hadn’t seen, namely, that a 2012 Springer book called Mathematical SETI that cites Sagan’s 1980 chart approvingly (see pp. 187-88) produces its own chart with a Medieval Gap. I checked our library’s electronic copy of the book this morning and there is indeed both a chart with a gap (backed up with detailed mathematical formulae) and a positive reference to Sagan’s timeline.
It might be worth noting that Shank has edited a book called The scientific enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2000) and co-edited with David Lindberg The Cambridge history of science: Medieval science (2013). If there was enough science in the Middle Ages to fill this 700-page volume published by CUP, there was enough to fill Sagan’s white space and Williams’s blank pages.
Aren’t you mixing apples and oranges here? Let’s read where you write:
". . . Shank continues, still on page 20: "Sagan, in turn, may have taken a cue from Henry Smith Williams’s Great Astronomers (Simon and Schuster, 1930), whose medieval chapter consists of two biblical epigraphs ascribed to an “oriental anthology” followed by several blank pages. "
"As childish and petty as this seems, Shanks is correct. This book can be read in a digital scan online here:
[in that book] . . . a note at the bottom of p. 100 makes the following clarification:
“The reader will note that this page, as well as the next two, are blank. This is the most graphic method the author can devise to show that, astronomically speaking, nothing happened during the Middle Ages.”
Your conclusion?: “The only thing that didn’t happen was the author’s research into Medieval science. Even in the 1920s enough was known to fill in those blank pages and more.”
But Williams didn’t say “science” or “any science” … he said “astronomically speaking” !
In the 1000 year gap you have provided exactly one Cosmologist … who historians quote, for the record, as not supporting a Sun-centered model of the solar system. Do you really think you can fill the 1000 year gap with astronomers who made a significant contribution during that time?
The answer to your question is yes, a good deal of the ‘gap’ can be filled in with astronomers and innovations important to astronomy.
Yet we will look in vain for a supporter of heliocentrism between Aristarchus of Samos in the ancient world and Copernicus in the Renaissance. So, just to be clear, there are no supporters of true, realist heliocentrism in the Middle Ages. But this doesn’t mean there is nothing to talk about “astronomically speaking”. Far from it.
First of all, it is important to remember that geocentrism and heliokinesis is just plain common sense. Even scientists in the twenty-first century speak about the sun rising and setting. This is how powerful the visual effect is. It really does look like the sun is moving across the sky and it really does feel like the earth is motionless. We know now that this is because the earth is turning on its axis and because we are moving with the earth and thus don’t feel its motion.
So powerful is the sense that the sun is moving and that the earth is still that three kinds of geocentrism survive to this day:
Phenomenalistic geocentrism
Astronomical geocentrism
Navigational geocentrism
The first category is the one I’ve already described: we still speak in geocentric terms in everyday speech and when writing poetry. We still say: “look at that beautiful sunset” and “the sun is up” because this is what the phenomena look like, even though we know the scientific reality.
Astronomical geocentrism is the geocentrism assumed by astronomers who conceive of the stars as points on a dome above us. Navigational geocentrism is the practical geocentrism used by navigators on sea and in the air when, as with category 2, a dome above the earth is assumed.
If we still use these three kinds of geocentrism, imagine how hard it would have been for people in the Middle Ages and even in the early modern period shortly after Copernicus released his heliocentric model to think otherwise. This is an important point, because one of the biggest factors “holding back” heliocentrism is something that has nothing to do with religion but rather that is shared with everyone: just plain common sense.
Nicole Oresme is important to the story of astronomy and heliocentrism because he provided the conceptual apparatus for a realist heliocentrism. This is an important stepping stone to actual realist heliocentrism. Oresme contended that Aristotle’s reasons for the immobility of the earth were not ironclad. He also pointed out that humans wouldn’t notice the earth’s movement if it were moving. So although he seems to have held to a realist geocentrism himself, his challenge to the Aristotelian edifice was bold.
After him, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), who became a Cardinal, wrote a work called On learned ignorance (a great title!), and in it he emphasised the limitations of human knowledge and suggested that it was extremely difficult if not impossible determine the structure and mechanics of the cosmos. Moreover, he also suggested that it might not be possible to know whether the earth was fixed or not. All of that was based on then current knowledge of course. So before Nicholas Copernicus, Nicole Oresme and Nicholas of Cusa help lay some of the ground work.
But this is only one piece of the puzzle and as we explore the history of astronomy during the one thousand years or so before Copernicus we see that the emergence of realist heliocentrism was founded on much, much more than simply switching the positions of the sun and the earth. Thus, mathematics was much more developed by 1500 AD than it had been in the ancient world. This, combined with the new Hindu number and place-value system, allowed for much more robust mathematics to be used in cosmology and astronomy. On top of that, a steady accumulation of astronomical observational data (all still naked eye of course) from the Islamic and Medieval Christian world gave early modern astronomers an advantage over their ancient counterparts.
Another example is physics: impetus theory was an important development that eventually helped lead astronomers away from Aristotelian physics and cosmology.
If we think of history of science as a march of progress from one hero to the next, we might miss some of these important structural issues. But taken together they help demonstrate that by the late Middle Ages, Christian Europe had more advanced mathematics, astronomy and other forms of science than were in existence in Antiquity.
If we go back to my chart, we can see that there are several names in it that played a role in astronomy (either directly or by contributing to mathematics and physics) during the supposed Medieval Gap in scientific progress:
John Philoponus
Brahmagupta
Bede
Al-Khârizmi
Ibn al-Haytham (my list doesn’t mention this, but he worked in astronomy too)
Grosseteste
Sacrobosco
Buridan
and of course Oresme.
But a higher resolution chart would bring others into focus. In the Islamic world, we’d want to add al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Biruni, ibn Bajja, ibn Rushd (Averroes) and especially Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274). This Persian astronomer and mathematician is sometimes described as the most important astronomer between Ptolemy and Copernicus. He worked in an observatory (yes, the Muslims and Medieval Christians had observatories) in what today would be called northern Iran. He is most famous for the Tusi-couple, which he deployed to advance on Ptolemaic astronomy and Copernicus deployed it too for the same reason. You can read a brief description of the Tusi-couple and see a nice animation of it here:
Quite simply, the ancient Greeks did not have this and many other mathematical instruments that were developed in the Middle Ages.
This is one reason why it makes no sense to say (as is implied by the more extreme advocates of the Medieval Gap) that if we took out the Middle Ages ancient science would have become modern science in a few quick jumps. No, history had to happen and it took many centuries of developments to get to the point where Copernicus proposed realist heliocentrism.
We could also add further Medieval Christians to the list of those who made contributions in astronomy. The Austrian Georg von Peuerbach (1423-1461) and the German Johannes Mueller von Koenigsberg (Regiomontanus) (1436-1476) are two giants from the fifteenth century (coming near the end of the Middle Ages). Earlier still, we can point to the Alfonsine Tables of the 1250s, which were based on Islamic astronomical observations and more recent work, including that of the Jews Yehuda ben Moshe and Isaac ibn Sid. These tables served later astronomers, including Copernicus.
Now of course, not everything proposed by these Islamic and Christian astronomers and mathematics stood the test of time. But even much that did not was important to the development of science as ideas were tested and tried.
That said, as I have stressed many times, this is not to say that there was no slow down in scientific progress in the Middle Ages. The dislocations caused by the Barbarian invasions and the Viking adventures, amongst other causes, certainly put some limits on what was possible in the first half of the period. There are other factors not yet mentioned.
One is the division between cosmology and astronomy in the Middle Ages. Copernicus and others brought them together when astronomy and mathematics were elevated in the disciplinary hierarchy to the level of natural philosophy (which dealt with causation in the real world). But this division began in the ancient world. Cosmology is associated with Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras, whereas Ptolemy helped found a kind of instrumentalist astronomy. For more on this, see John Henry, A short history of scientific thought, p. 70.
Another is what historian Peter Harrison proposed in his 1998 CUP book The Bible, Protestantism and the rise of natural science. Harrison argues that the emblematic view of nature that was dominant in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages was not conducive to an empirical view of nature. This changed, Harrison argues, with the Protestant Reformation, when we see a shift from a kind of allegorical mode of scriptural exegesis to the literal-historical mode promoted by Luther and other Protestants. In short, what Harrison sets out in his book is the idea that the shift from an allegorical approach to interpreting the Bible to a literal approach helped encourage the shift from the emblematic to empirical view of nature that we associate with the Scientific Revolution. Thus, sola scriptura helps stimulate sola natura. If Harrison is correct, and he presents a compelling case, this is a positive religious stimulus to the advance of science. Of course, this is but one factor.
There is much, much more to say, but the reading week is over and I go back to full-time teaching again tomorrow. So let me just encourage anyone interested in science during the Middle Ages to consult the professional scholarship on this period that I have already cited (I am a trained early modernist, not a Medievalist). I am referring to, amongst others, James Hannam’s book and the mighty 700-page tome The Cambridge history of science: Medieval science.
Finally, in general terms anyone reading recent surveys of the history of science (such as John Henry’s) will see that there is no Medieval Gap. So, who do we believe? The professional historians of science or the purveyors of agenda-driven pseudo-history that trot out the Myth of the Medieval Gap? I leave everyone with this example of the latter, that comes with a dark space of around 1800 years as we jump from Archimedes’ shout Eureka! to the shouts of a clerical mob with torches and pitchforks chasing poor old Galileo:
It’s well produced, but someone forgot to consult a historian of science … (and by the way, Isaac Newton didn’t have a beard).
Complex, yes? I love the term “Complexity Thesis”. And every time we have to clarify matters,
it is, once again, complex!
I only urge an air of compassion when cataloging Sagan’s faults. He had a gripe against the Catholic Church. If we had a chance to speak with Sagan, I assume he would admit that the Catholic Church has reformed its views (somewhat) regarding heretics and especially regarding scientists.
But our Creationist Opposition still has a gripe against the Catholic Church!
And whatever arguments are enlisted agaInst Sagan can be enlisted In Spades against the Creationists!
