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The strategic act by which Grosseteste and his thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successors created modern experimental science was to unite the experimental habit of the practical arts with the rationalism of twelfth-century philosophy.

— Alistair Cameron Crombie Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

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More quotes by Alistair Cameron Crombie

Nicolaus Copernicus is the supreme example of a man who revolutionized science by looking at the old facts in a new way.

Medieval and Early Modern Science (1952)

Newton achieved the clearest appreciation of the relation between the empirical elements in a scientific system and the hypothetical elements derived from a philosophy of nature.

The idea that the order of demonstration was the order of nature came from Plato. Aristotle said that the order of discovery was the reverse of the order of demonstration.

Grosseteste's contribution was to emphasize the importance of falsification in the search for true causes and to develop the method of verification and falsification into a systematic method of experimental procedure.

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alistair Cameron Crombie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.