The Middle Ages: first stirrings of the scientific revolution

Abstract

Abstract In histories of dynamics written in the nineteenth century, the period between antiquity and Galileo was treated as an almost complete blank. It was believed that nothing significant had occurred during the ‘Dark Ages’. This attitude was changed almost single-handed by the French physicist Pierre Duhem, who became an historian of science almost by accident. In his monumental Le Systeme du Monde he argued that several basic principles of Galileo’s physics were in essence already worked out in the fourteenth century, and that Galileo’s work consisted more of explication and further development rather than genuine revolution.