“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)

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Alistair Cameron Crombie 8
Australian zoologist, historian of science 1915–1996

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“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.”

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“Grosseteste's contribution was to emphasize the importance of falsification in the search for true causes and to develop the method of verification and falsification into a systematic method of experimental procedure.”

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

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