Alistair Cameron Crombie: Quotes about science

Alistair Cameron Crombie was Australian zoologist, historian of science. Explore interesting quotes on science.
Alistair Cameron Crombie: 16   quotes 0   likes

“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)

Art , Science

“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)

World , Problem , Appearance , Science

“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).

Way , Science

“In its application to natural science Grosseteste based his method of verification and falsification on two assumptions about the nature of reality. (a) The first was the principle of the uniformity of nature, meaning that forms are always uniform in their operations…. In support of this principle he quoted 'Aristotles II de Generat.:…'the same cause, provided it remains in the same condition, cannot produce anything but the same effect.' (b) The second assumption Grosseteste made was that of the principle of economy, or lex parsimoniae. This he also derived from Aristotle, who stated it as a pragmatic principle.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie

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

Quotes , Support , Nature , Reality