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On 6 Apr 2005 at 16:27, Bill wrote:

> George Huxtable wrote:
> > But I'm a bit puzzled when Bill writes-
> >
> >> Around 1377 Oresme wrote his Traiti? du ciel et du monde, a French
> >> translation and commentary of Aristotle's De caelo et mundo, in which he
> >> again discussed the circumnavigator's paradox.
> >
> > Is he saying here that it was originally Aristotle, before Oresme, who
> > had posed and resolved the circumnavigator's paradox?

I had a scan of a translation of Aristotle's "On the Heavens" last night
and found nothing that even suggested the circumnavigator's paradox. The
commentary by Oresme in his "Traiti? du ciel et du monde" is probably full
of ideas that are much more interesting than Aristotle. There is a wealth
of information on the web about Oresme discussing his proposal that the
earth rotates rather than the heavens revolving (200 years before
Copernicus). After presenting a nice argument in favor of the idea he
eventually drops it because it would contradict holy scripture (but with a
warning that one has to be vigilant against such clever arguments). He
also used a graph to plot velocity versus time under constant
acceleration, predating Vieta and Galileo by centuries in showing the way
to analytic geometry. A very interesting character.

Ken Muldrew.

   

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