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Because their innovations were based on an intuitive, rather than mathematical, understanding of the world. You can only get so far that way. They didn't have
by defen 18y ago
Because their innovations were based on an intuitive, rather than mathematical, understanding of the world. You can only get so far that way. They didn't have a Galileo.
- eugenejen 18y agoAre you sure Galileo had a mathematical understanding of the world? Galileo did not use any maths in his writing in dialogue.
- astine 18y agoGalileo's math was purely Euclidean. We own more to Bacon and Descartes for our modern mathematics and scientific viewpoints.
- eru 18y agoDo not forget Leibniz.
- astine 18y agoI didn't forget him, Leibniz was later. By the time Leibniz and Newton were around, modern ideas about the relationship of math and the sciences were already gaining acceptance.
- eru 18y agoThough I recently come to like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_history It de-emphasizes the 'Great Men'.
- zasz 18y agoExcuse me? The Chinese had their own proof of the Pythagorean theorem a long time before Pythagoras did. You cannot accuse them of a lack of mathematical intuition. http://www.visual-euclid.org/chinese/ http://www.visual-euclid.org/chinese/
- defen 18y agoI wasn't saying they were bad at/didn't have math, just that they didn't apply it to understanding the physical world.
- helveticaman 18y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Kuo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Kuo