light

Parmenides

Plato

occupation / innovator as

historian

nationality

American

physicist

university teacher

is corpuscular in nature, and thus travels faster in glass than in air.

Newton's proof of the law of refraction is based on an erroneous notion that light travels faster in glass than in air, the same error that Descartes had made. This error stems from the fact that both of them thought that light was corpuscular in nature.

is known for stating that either a thing is or it is not, meaning that creation and destruction is impossible.

Parmenides believed that all Being is what he called the One, and denied absolutely the possibility of change. He believed that the cosmos is full (i.e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory. One Parmenidean fragment stated, "Either a thing is or it is not," meaning that creation and destruction is impossible.

is of the belief that all Being is 'the One'. He denied absolutely the possibility of change.

is of the belief that the cosmos is full (i.e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory.

is his most enduring influence on science was his advice to approach the study of nature as an exercise in geometry, this "geometrization of nature,"such as astronomy, one can formulate laws that are as "certain" as those in geometry.

Note that Plato's influence in this regard, may be traced to the Pythagoreans. Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012)

John Freely

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John Freely