Science in the Latin West during Medieval Age

Early Middle Ages (AD 476–1000)

In the ancient world, Greek had been the primary language of science. The attempts to translate Greek writings into Latin had limited success.As the knowledge of Greek declined during the transition to the Middle Ages, the Latin West found itself cut off from its Greek philosophical and scientific roots. Most scientific inquiry came to be based on information gleaned from sources which were often incomplete and posed serious problems of interpretation.

Deurbanization reduced the scope of education and by the sixth century teaching and learning moved to monastic and cathedral schools, with the center of education being the study of the Bible.

Clergymen - leading scholars of the early centuries for whom the study of nature was but a small part of their interest. The study of nature was pursued more for practical reasons than as an abstract inquiry: the need to care for the sick led to the study of medicine and of ancient texts on drugs, the need for monks to determine the proper time to pray led them to study the motion of the stars, the need to compute the date of Easter led them to study and teach rudimentary mathematics and the motions of the Sun and Moon.

Educational Reform (Charles the Great)

7 liberal arts

• Trivium (literary education) - rhetoric, grammar, dialect
• Quadrivium (scientific education) - arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy

High Middle Ages (AD 1000–1300)

• the birth of medieval universities
• The rediscovery of the works of Aristotle

Grosseteste - Founder of the famous Oxford Franciscan School. He built his work on Aristotle's vision of the dual path of scientific reasoning. (Concluding from particular observations into a universal law, and then back again: from universal laws to prediction of particulars.) Grosseteste called this "resolution and composition".

Bacon - described a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the need for independent verification. He recorded the manner in which he conducted his experiments in precise detail so that others could reproduce and independently test his results - a cornerstone of the scientific method.

Late Middle Ages (AD 1300–1500)

The first half of the 14th century saw the scientific work of great thinkers.

William of Occam - postulate the principle of parsimony (known today as Occam's Razor). This principle is one of the main heuristics used by modern science to select between two or more undetermined theories.

Jean Buridan - developed the theory of impetus which was a step towards the modern concept of inertia.

Thomas Bradwardine and his partners, the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, Oxford - distinguished kinematics from dynamics, emphasizing kinematics, and investigating instantaneous velocity.

They formulated the mean speed theorem: a body moving with constant velocity travels distance and time equal to an accelerated body whose velocity is half the final speed of the accelerated body.

They also demonstrated this theorem—essence of "The Law of Falling Bodies" -- long before Galileo is credited with this.

Nicole Oresme - showed that the reasons proposed by the physics of Aristotle against the movement of the earth were not valid and adduced the argument of simplicity for the theory that the earth moves, and not the heavens. Despite this argument in favor of the Earth's motion Oresme, fell back on the commonly held opinion that "everyone maintains, and I think myself, that the heavens do move and not the earth."

Crisis of the Late Middle Ages

Black death of 1348 - it sealed a sudden end to the previous period of massive scientific change. The plague killed a third of the people in Europe, especially in the crowded conditions of the towns, where the heart of innovations lay. Recurrences of the plague and other disasters caused a continuing decline of population for a century.