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However, when Oresme tried to sum the terms in the sequence, he realized that the sums got larger and larger and larger.

“The two of them are still there,” Mario Gonzalez, 65, said Wednesday morning as he dropped off a bouquet of flowers for his longtime friend Oresme Gil Guerra, who he grew up with in Cuba, and his wife, Betty Guerra.

But for thirty years now a second generation of historians and philosophers of science has been attacking the claim that the Scientific Revolution vastly improved humankind’s ability to understand nature; adopting a relativist perspective, they have been unwilling to acknowledge that Newton was superior to Aristotle or Oresme, even if only in the sense that his theories made possible better predictions and new types of intervention.

If we look back to the Parisian philosophers of the fourteenth century, for example, to Oresme, Buridan, John of Saxony and Pierre d’Ailly, we find ourselves in a world where scholars reported each others’ arguments but failed to record who originated any particular line of argument, so that historians still cannot write the history of the school of Paris in terms of who influenced whom; being first was not what mattered to fourteenth-century philosophers.

But no medieval author compared the universe to anything so coarse as a mill; and Oresme’s comparison was very carefully limited: he was comparing the circular movement of the heavens to the turning wheels of a clock, not the whole universe to a clock; he did not think of clocks as machines and he does not use the clock metaphor to prove the existence of God.