Lucio Russo
Lucio Russo (born November 22, 1944), an Italian physicist, mathematician and historian of science.
The Forgotten Revolution
- About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.
- 1.1, "The Erasure of the Scientific Revolution", p. 6
- Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology.
- 1.3, "Science", p. 15n
- Euclid … manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] by reducing the problem to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.
- 2.4, "Discrete Mathematics and the Notion of Infinity", p. 45
- Today Eratosthenes' method seems almost banal … yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeded in stating it coherently.
- 3.2, "Geodesy and Mathematical Geography", p. 68
- Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of disctraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses.
- 4.7, "Use of Natural Power", p. 126
- From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist … is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. … Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?
- 7.6, "The Figurative Arts, Literature and Music", p. 228
- The oft-heard comment that Leonado [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.
- 11.2, "The Renaissance", p. 336
