Henriksson, you're really reviewing the man whom started steam engines and gas physics as "more someone who writes about inventions made by others in the past (sometimes he didn't seem to fully understand it) when Alexandria was more advanced, than someone who actually invents stuff."? I hate to see what you have to say about Newton and Einstein.
Well, yes? I don't believe he "started steam engines and gas physics", though the idea of a universal genius of "Antiquity" is admittedly a quite romantic notion. Regarding Isaac Newton, just take one thing which everyone thinks Newton was first with. Like, say, he was the founder of the theory of dispersion. Well, I feel the most effective way to dispel that notion is to leave the word to mr. Newton:
"[...]this Bow is made by Refraction of the Sun's Light in drops of falling Rain. This was understood by some of the
Antients, and of late more fully discovered and explained by the Famous
Antonius de Dominis Archbishop of
Spatolo, in his book
De Radiis Visûs & Lucis, published by his Friend
Bartolus at
Venice, in the year 1611, and written above twenty Years before. For he teaches there how the interior Bow is made in round Drops of Rain by two refractions of the Sun's Light, and one reflexions between them in each Drop of Water, and proves his Explications by Experiments. [...] The same Explication
Des-Cartes hath pursued in his Meteors."
-
Opticks, Isaac Newton, Book I, Part II, Prop. IX, page 126-127
As Lucio Russo explains:
"Six pages later comes a report of several of de Dominis' experiments with globes full of water, which today are usually attributed to Newton. We must conclude that, despite Newton's reservations, the modern theory of dispersion did not start with him or Descartes, but with the Dalmatian archbishop. Since his
De radiis was written no later than 1590 - as we know from the preface, by the editor Giovanni Bartolo, to the book's first edition, of 1611 - his optical experiments must have been started around the same time, if not earlier, than Galileo's first experiments (1586). Thus de Dominis not only pioneered the modern theory of dispersion: it seems he must be regarded as one of the founders of the "experimental method" that, in the common opinion, is exclusive to modern science.
De Dominis' work, from the title onward, uses Hellenistic terminology: it talks of visual rays, which had been abolished by the Arabs back in the eleventh century. Even more tellingly, his explanation for the rainbow had already been given at the turn of the thirteenth century by Dietrich (Theodoric) of Freiberg and, apparently independently, by the Arabic writer Kamal al-Din al Farisi, both of whom described the same experiments with water globes reported by the Dominis."
Between that and your agreement with Draco on his wrong democracy crank, i don't think you're being any more reasonable than he is, and am also done talking with you on this thread
All I really did was disagree with how Hitler was elected in a truly democratic fashion, though I see how my position could be misinterpreted. Too bad you don't want to continue this discussion.