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Lucio Russo Quotes

Lucio Russo is an Italian physicist, mathematician and historian of science. Born in Venice, he teaches at the Mathematics Department of the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

Among his main areas of interest are Gibbs measure of the Ising model, percolation theory, and finite Bernoulli schemes, within which he proved an approximate version of the classical Kolmogorov's zero–one law.In the history of science, he has reconstructed some contributions of the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus, through the analysis of his surviving works, and the proof of heliocentrism attributed by Plutarch to Seleucus of Seleucia and studied the history of theories of tides, from the Hellenistic to modern age. Wikipedia  

✵ 22. November 1944
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Lucio Russo: 9   quotes 0   likes

Famous Lucio Russo Quotes

“The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.”

Lucio Russo

11.2, "The Renaissance", p. 336
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.”

Lucio Russo

1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 8
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. … The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.”

Lucio Russo

11.10, "The Erasure of Ancient Science", pp. 390–391
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist … is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. … Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?”

Lucio Russo

7.6, "The Figurative Arts, Literature and Music", p. 228
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of distraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses.”

Lucio Russo

4.7, "Use of Natural Power", p. 126
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.”

Lucio Russo

1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 6
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal … yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently.”

Lucio Russo

3.2, "Geodesy and Mathematical Geography", p. 68
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“Euclid … manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.”

Lucio Russo

2.4, "Discrete Mathematics and the Notion of Infinity", p. 45
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

“Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology.”

Lucio Russo

1.3, "Science", p. 15n
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

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