How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (30 page)

Today, Ockham is remembered primarily for his principle known as
Ockham’s razor
, which stresses parsimony in the formulation of explanations. As he expressed it, explanations should “not be multiplied beyond necessity.” Too often this is misrepresented as saying one should prefer the simplest explanation, but the simplest might well be an inferior explanation. What Ockham meant was that theories should include no more terms and principles than are needed to explain the matters in question. Hence, if two theories are equally efficient, prefer the one that is simpler.

But Ockham’s razor was not Ockham’s important contribution to understanding the cosmos. Because the Greeks thought vacuums could not exist, they assumed that the universe was a sphere filled with transparent matter. That meant heavenly bodies would need to constantly overcome friction to keep moving. This notion prompted many Greek philosophers to transform the sun, moon, stars, and other bodies into living creatures having the capacity to move on their own, while others imagined various sorts of pushers in the form of gods and spirits. Early Christian scholars assumed that angels pushed the heavenly bodies along their courses. It was Ockham who did away with the need for pushers by recognizing that space is a frictionless vacuum. He then anticipated Newton’s First Law of Motion by proposing that once God had set the heavenly bodies in motion, they would, facing no friction, remain in motion ever after.
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Jean Buridan (1300–1358)

Born in France, Jean Buridan was a student at the University of Paris and then joined the faculty. Buridan differed from most of his academic colleagues by remaining a secular priest rather than joining a religious order.
Many stories persist about his alleged amorous affairs, but whether or not they are true, he was regarded as a glamorous figure around Paris.

Buridan made a pivotal contribution when he introduced the concept we now know as
inertia
, which explained Ockham’s insight that things in motion will tend to remain in motion. Aristotle and his followers, including most Scholastics of Buridan’s era, believed that a body remained in motion only when an external force was continuously applied. So, for example, Aristotelians held that a projectile would fall immediately to the ground were in not for eddies or vibrations in the air around it applying motive force. Buridan shifted the focus from imposed forces to a property of the moving body itself: he called this property
impetus
. As he described it: “After leaving the arm of the thrower, the projectile would be moved by impetus given to it by the thrower and would continue to be moved as long as the impetus remained stronger than the resistance, and would be of indefinite duration were it not diminished and corrupted by a contrary force resisting it or by something inclining it to a contrary motion.”
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Oddly enough, although Buridan extended Ockham’s physics, they became bitter opponents on several theological issues.
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Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320–1382)

The next vital step toward the heliocentric model was taken by the most brilliant (and sadly neglected) of the Scholastic scientists, Nicole Oresme. Born in Normandy, Oresme attended the University of Paris and then joined the faculty. In 1364 he was appointed dean of the Cathedral of Rouen, and in 1377 he was appointed Bishop of Lisieux.

Among his many major achievements, Oresme firmly established that the earth turned on its axis, which gave the illusion that the other heavenly bodies circled the earth. He began by noting that the movements we observed of the heavenly bodies would appear exactly the same whether the earth turned or these bodies were circling the earth. So there were no observational data to settle the matter. Oresme reasoned, however, that the earth’s spinning offered a far more economical explanation than did the notion that an immense number of heavenly bodies all circled the earth.

The idea that the earth rotates had occurred to many people through the centuries, but two objections had always made it seem implausible. First, if the earth turned, why wasn’t there a constant wind from the east caused by the rotation? Second, why did an arrow shot up into the air
not fall well behind (or in front of) the shooter? Oresme addressed both objections by proposing that the motion of the earth was imparted to all objects on the earth or close by, including the atmosphere.
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Albert of Saxony (ca. 1316–1390)

A farmer’s son born in Germany, Albert was recognized for his brilliance in childhood, which led to his being sent first to the University of Prague and then to the University of Paris. After earning his master’s degree at Paris, he joined the faculty. Subsequently he convinced the Duke of Austria to found the University of Vienna, and in 1365 he became its first rector. The next year he became Bishop of Halberstadt (the diocese in which he was born) and served until his death.

Albert was a student of Jean Buridan, and he extended the theory of impetus and made it more precise, noting that although air resistance slows the motion of an object, gravity alone pulls it to earth after the impetus is spent. But Albert’s most important contribution was the textbook
Physics
, which carefully summarized the work of all his predecessors and constructed many original proofs of major propositions. This text was read throughout Europe for several centuries.
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Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420)

Born in France and educated at the University of Paris, Pierre d’Ailly joined the university’s faculty in 1368, serving as chancellor from 1389 through 1395. He then was consecutively Bishop of Le Puy, of Noyon, and of Cambrai before becoming a cardinal in 1411.

In 1410 he published
Image of the World
(
Ymago mundi
), a widely read work of cosmology that included his calculation that the circumference of the earth was 31,500 miles—higher than the actual distance of 24,901 miles, but a considerable improvement over Plato’s estimate of about 40,000 miles.
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The book also suggested that only a small sea separated East and West, which greatly misled Columbus. More important, d’Ailly’s book spurred interest in questions about the relationship between earth and the stars.
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Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464)

A German who became Bishop of Brixen and then was elevated to cardinal in 1448, Nicholas of Cusa was educated at the great Italian University of Padua, where he learned that the earth turns in response to “an
impetus conferred upon it at the beginning of time.” Based on eclipses, he noted that the earth was smaller than the sun but larger than the moon. But what of the earth’s position—was it fixed? Nicholas observed that “whether a man is on the earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless center, and that all other things are in motion.”
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It followed that humans could not trust their perceptions that the earth was stationary in space. Indeed, according to Nicholas, the earth moved through space.
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Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)

All this prior theorizing was well known to Copernicus—Albert of Saxony’s
Physics
, for example, was published at Padua in 1492, just prior to Copernicus’s becoming a student there.

So what did Copernicus contribute? He put the sun in the middle of the solar system and had the earth circling it as one of the planets. What gave such special luster to his work was that he expressed it all in mathematics.
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He worked out the geometry of his system so as to permit the calculation of future positions of the bodies involved, which was essential for setting the dates of Easter, the solstices, and the like. But these calculations were no more accurate than those based on the Ptolemaic system dating from the second century. That is because Copernicus failed to realize that orbits in the solar system are elliptical, not circular. To make his system work, Copernicus had to postulate loops in the orbits of heavenly bodies that accounted for the seeming delays in the completion of those orbits. There was no observational support for this contention.

Consequently, everything in Copernicus’s famous book,
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
, is wrong, other than the placement of the sun in the center. It was nearly a century later that Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), a German Protestant, got things right by substituting ellipses for Copernicus’s circles. Now each heavenly body was always where it was supposed to be, on time, with no loops needed.

Of course, even with Kepler’s additions, there still was no
explanation
of why the solar system functioned as it did—of why, for example, bodies remained in their orbits rather than flying off into space. The achievement of such an explanation awaited Isaac Newton (1642–1727). But over several previous centuries, many essential pieces of such a theory had been assembled: that the universe was a vacuum; that no pushers were needed because once in motion, the heavenly bodies would continue in
motion; that the earth turned; that the sun was the center of the solar system; that the orbits were elliptical.

This record of systematic progress explains why the distinguished historian of science I. Bernard Cohen noted that “the idea that a Copernican revolution in science occurred goes counter to the evidence … and is the invention of later historians.”
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Most of Cohen’s sophisticated colleagues agree.
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Copernicus added a small step forward in a long process of normal science, albeit one having immense polemical and philosophical implications.

It should be noted, too, that the scholars involved in this long process were not rebel secularists. Not only were they devout Christians; they all were priests or monks—even bishops and cardinals.

And one more thing: they all were embedded in the great Scholastic universities. In fact, nine of the thirteen who preceded Copernicus were faculty at the University of Paris.
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Faith and Reason

The pursuit of knowledge did not suddenly appear in the seventeenth century. From early days, Christian theologians were devoted to natural philosophy. That provided the fundamental basis for the creation of universities, thus giving an institutional home to science. The Christian thinkers who studied and taught at these universities were responsible for remarkable advances in an era supposedly short on progress.

Similar (and similarly unappreciated) advances were occurring in industry and technology.

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Industry, Trade, and Technology

T
here is a growing illusion, fostered by an assortment of revisionist scholars, that Europe’s industrial and technological lead over the rest of the world developed only recently, having come out of nowhere at the end of the eighteenth or even as late as the nineteenth century.
¹
Some even claim that the West stole it all from Asia, which supposes that Asia was already industrialized before a sudden decline into backwardness.
²

It may well be true, as these revisionists claim, that the total value of what was being traded in China during, say, the sixteenth century was greater than that of European trade.
³
But that difference reflects only a greater volume based on a larger population. It tells us nothing about how the trade goods were created or about the technological merits of what was being bought and sold. Eyeglasses, for example, were being sold only in Europe at this time, and in large quantities there, but a hundred pounds of rice outweighed and may well have cost more than a pair of eyeglasses.

In any event, despite the fact that these matters are being solemnly debated in academia, no serious reader needs me to refute such nonsense; I also ignored “respectable” claims that the Black Death came from outer space.
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The reality is that medieval Europe saw the rise of banking, elaborate manufacturing networks, rapid innovations in technology and finance, and a busy network of trading cities. Also evident in this period were
the first stirrings of what eventually became the Industrial “Revolution.” Europe had long been ahead of the rest of the world in technology, but by the end of the sixteenth century that gap had become a chasm.

Consider military capabilities. Europe’s sixteenth-century navies consisted of large, heavily armed, sophisticated sailing ships that could go anywhere and sink anything.
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Only in European armies did the rank and file bear firearms and were they backed up by maneuverable field artillery.
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In addition to this huge technological superiority were the tactical and training advantages that had favored the West since the days of ancient Greece. Those advantages would continue to favor the West for centuries, in fact. As late as 1900, after the Chinese army was fully equipped with modern firearms and artillery imported from the West, 409 Western soldiers—armed only with rifles, pistols, three machine guns (with very little ammunition), and a homemade cannon—withstood the Imperial army’s fifty-five-day attack on the embassy compound in Peking. Holding off thousands of Imperial forces, the Western troops suffered casualties of nearly 50 percent but still stood firm.
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