History: A medieval multiverse

A brief history of the multiverse.

The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of low-energy laws of physics. Since these parts are extremely large, the interior of each of them behaves as if it were a separate universe, practically unaffected by...

Epistolary Documents in High-Medieval History- Writing

A liquid history Blood and animation in late medieval art

In 1276 Giles of Rome compared sperm’s effect on menstrual blood to the work of an artist carving idols from wood.2 His modification of a famous argument by Plato, later taken up by Aristotle, is highly original and points to an important junction of theories about human procreation and theories of artistic creation. Aristotle drew analogies between divine, natural, and artisanal creation with ...

What is the history of medieval optics really about?

INCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1975, David Lindberg’s Theories of Vision from Al-Kind to Kepler 2 has become the canonical ı̄ source for our understanding of medieval optics and its place in the development of modern optics. Lindberg’s ulterior purpose in writing this book was to show that, contrary to prevailing opinion, Johan Kepler’s account of sight, which is based on the casting of point-bypoint i...

Incompleteness versus a Platonic multiverse

The Platonic multiverse view is that there are multiple and incompatible concepts of a set with corresponding Platonic universes. For example the continuum hypothesis may be true in some of these universes and false in others. This philosophical view leads to an approach for exploring mathematics that is similar to an approach that stems from the more conservative view that infinity is a potent...