>>Welcome to the History of Science Collections
of the University of Oklahoma Libraries -- one
of the premier research collections in its
field. Holdings of nearly 100 thousand volumes
represent every field and subject area of
science, technology, mathematics, and medicine.
Science has a story and these rare books will
help us explore that story from antiquity
to the age of Newton.
Consider this volume, the De revolutionibus,
one of the most important works in the history
of science. This is the book in which Nicolaus
Copernicus argued that the sun lies in the
center of the universe while the Earth flies
through the heavens around the sun, revolving
around the sun once each year. We'll study
this book in more detail later, but right
now let's use it to illustrate the two major
themes of the course.
The first major theme is crossing cultures.
Simply put, the growth of Western science
cannot be understood apart from rich and sustained
interactions between multiple cultures.
This page contains records of lunar eclipses
observed in ancient Babylonia going as far
back as the 700s BCE. On this page, Copernicus
converted tables for planetary motions from
the Julian calendar that was in use in his
own day to the calendar developed in ancient
Egypt 3000 years before. Copernicus writes
that he observed the September equinox in
1515. According to the Egyptian calendar,
it was the 1840th year after the death of
Alexander on the sixth day of the month of
Phaophi half an hour after sunrise. This page,
in the same section of the book, shows the
length of the year determined by Hipparchus
in the mid second century BCE.
Hipparchus's length of the year was transmitted
beyond Mesopotamia and Persia to ancient India.
In the Islamic period, astronomers inherited
this remarkable cross-cultural heritage of
Indian, Greek, Roman and Mesopotamian astronomy.
And this page shows Copernicus's model for
the motion of the moon. It depended upon a
remarkable technical innovation called the
Tusi-couple, named after Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
who worked in modern day northwest Iran in
the mid-1200s. The Tusi-couple combined two
circles, one inside the other and half its
size. A planet, represented as a point on
the inside circle, will trace out a straight
line along the diameter of the larger circle
moving up and down or in and out from the
center as necessary to adjust its apparent
magnitude to our eyes.
The title page of Copernicus shows that the
book was printed in Nuremburg in 1543. Less
than 30 years earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther
nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg
Cathedral, launching the Protestant Revolution.
Nuremberg was a leading center of Lutheran
theology in Reformation Europe. Copernicus,
on the other hand, was a Catholic working
in a cathedral in northern Poland.
So we have seen in just these few quick examples
that this European book published as a collaboration
between Catholics and Protestants in the middle
of the Reformation incorporated astronomical
knowledge of many ancient cultures.
So in this course, I'm inviting you to join
with me on a journey, a time travel tour spanning
more than four millennia across a half dozen
major civilizations -- Mesopotamian, Egyptian,
Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Indian, Chinese,
Islamic, Medieval, and early modern European
cultures.
If the first major theme of this course is
crossing cultures, the second is crossing
disciplinary boundaries. One of the most pressing
questions for science today is how to facilitate
interdisciplinary collaboration. The history
of science offers a continuous account of
case studies, both pro and con, for how disciplines
emerge, collaborate, compete, and adapt to
new problem sets and new methodologies.
In his dedication, Copernicus wrote that astronomy
is a branch of mathematics and that mathematics
is for mathematicians. Why would he say this?
At the time, physicists were trained more
in logic than mathematics, yet physicists
were granted more authority and credibility
than astronomers in their statements about
the universe.
The greatest resistance to Copernicus came
from physicists and others who underestimated
the power of new mathematical methodologies.
Not only physicists, but also Theologians
were unprepared to recognize the potential
of mathematical arguments for the motion of
the Earth.
So this book as a whole was a challenge for
mathematics, to the established and reputable
domains of physics and theology, both of which
had to learn to adapt to the knowledge claims
of the new mathematical science. More than
a battle of science versus religion, Copernicus
was a mathematician battling for the unexpected
reach of mathematics compared to traditional
methodologies. It is of interest that here,
Copernicus dedicated this book to none other
than Pontificia Maximum, Pope Paul III, who
was sympathetic to mathematical methods. On
the page before this one, we find the only
signed piece of fore matter -- a letter from
Nikolaus Schönberg, Cardinalis, who asked
Copernicus on behalf of the college of Cardinals
in Rome to publish this great work.
The relations between science and religion
will confront us at every step in this course
because religion and culture were thoroughly
intertwined in all the pre-modern cultures
we will explore. So here's a piece of advice
for how to handle the intertwining of science
and religion. Think of their relationships,
now in harmony -- now in conflict, as analogous
to the relations between different disciplines
today. The modern scientific disciplines demonstrate
complex relations equivalent to those of religion
and science in the periods we will study.
So the first major theme of this course is
crossing cultures, and the second is crossing
disciplinary boundaries. Both themes form
part of the story of Copernicus's De revolutionibus
of 1543 and of the entire course. Welcome
to this exciting journey.
