Alistair Cameron Crombie Quotes (8 quotes)

Alistair Cameron Crombie: 8 quotes 0 likes

Famous Alistair Cameron Crombie Quotes

“The strategic act by which Grosseteste and his thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successors created modern experimental science was to unite the experimental habit of the practical arts with the rationalism of twelfth-century philosophy.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

“Grosseteste appears to have been the first medieval writer to recognize and deal with the two fundamental methodological problems of induction and experimental verification and falsification which arose when the Greek conception of geometrical demonstration was applied to the world of experience. He appears to have been the first to set out a systematic and coherent theory of experimental investigation and rational explanation by which the Greek geometrical method was turned into modern experimental science. As far as is known, he and his successors were the first to use and exemplify such a theory in the details of original research into concrete problems.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

“To understand events as experienced by actual men and institutions we must be concerned with the history of errors and false starts as well as successes-although we make this distinction on the basis of what we now know of the tradition of success. As we go back in time the uncertainty of the outlook and of the objectives of scientific inquiries increases. The essence of the scientific movement is research. The answers to the essential question, what to do in scientific research-what questions to put to nature, by what methods to get answers, what to count as satisfactory answers-became clear only by the accumulation of successes and the marking of failures.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie

A. C. Crombie, 1963. as cited in: Robert Maxwell Young. Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, 1970. p. 101.

“Newton achieved the clearest appreciation of the relation between the empirical elements in a scientific system and the hypothetical elements derived from a philosophy of nature.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie

Alistair Cameron Crombie, as quoted by John Freely in Before Galileo; The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe http://books.google.com/books?id=MfhjAAAAQBAJ (2012).

“Nicolaus Copernicus is the supreme example of a man who revolutionized science by looking at the old facts in a new way.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie

Alistair Cameron Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science (1952) as quoted by John Freely in Before Galileo: The Birth of Early Modern Science in Medieval Europe http://books.google.com/books?id=MfhjAAAAQBAJ (2012).