ONE thing that irks this Babbage is the view that if schools simply focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)—at the expense of frivolous “non-scientific” subjects—then a model 21st-century workforce would magically materialise. Those entertaining such notions should consider the following a brief morality tale. Robert Grosseteste, an English scholar who lived from about 1175 to 1253, was an intellectual giant. A scientist, philosopher, mathematician, theologian and at one point Bishop of Lincoln, he was one of the first thinkers in northern Europe to read both Aristotle and the various Islamic commentators on the Greek philosopher’s work, all of which were newly translated into Latin. And in his treatise De Luce (“On Light”, written around 1225), Grosseteste was also the first to try to develop unified physical laws to explain the origin and form of the geocentric medieval universe of heavens and Earth.

In the 13th century, atoms were thought to be infinitesimal points, so for matter to have volume, something else was needed. For Grosseteste, that something was light. His geocentric cosmos began with an explosion of a type of light he called lux, which expanded into a vast, ever-thinning sphere of matter and light. But matter could only thin so far, thought Grosseteste, after which it crystallised into a “perfected” layer—the spherical boundary of his medieval universe. Another type of light, lumen, then radiated back, sweeping up, compressing and purifying any “imperfect” matter in its wake. This created the second heavenly sphere (the “fixed” stars), then each of five planets, the sun and moon. By now the lumen was so weak it could no longer purify matter, which left the imperfect Earth, its four elements and atmosphere. For all of this, Grosseteste defined universal physical laws.

If the origin of his cosmos makes it sound like Grosseteste predicted the Big Bang, you are indulging in “presentism”—the imposition of what we know now on what was known then. Tom McLeish, professor of physics and pro-vice-chancellor for research at Britain’s Durham University, was anxious to avoid that. But he and a multinational team of researchers did determine that Grosseteste’s physical laws were so rigorously defined that they could be re-expressed using modern mathematical and computing techniques—as the medieval scholar might have done if he had been able to use such methods. The thinking went that the translated equations could then be solved and the solutions explored.

All this started six years ago—and what the researchers discovered can be found at The Ordered Universe Project and in a paperrecently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. (Another, which uses Grosseteste’s work on rainbows to create an entirely new colour-coordinate system, was also published this year.) Among their findings was that the nature of Grosseteste’s cosmos is extremely sensitive to changes in four parameters that are implicit in his work: the intensity of the initial lux explosion, how strongly light and matter are coupled, and both the opacity of imperfect matter and transparency of perfect matter.

Only a small set of these parameters resulted in the “ordered” medieval universe Grosseteste sought to explain; most resulted either in no spheres being created or a “disordered” cosmos of numerous spheres. Grosseteste, then, had created a medieval “multiverse”. De Luce suggests that the scholar realized his theories could result in universes with all manner of spheres, although he did not appear to realize the significance of this. A century later, philosophers Albert of Saxony and Nicole Oresme both considered the idea of multiple worlds and how they might exist simultaneously or in sequence.

How is all this related to the STEM debate? To succeed, the Ordered Universe Project needed a team spanning both science and the humanities: physics, Latin studies, philosophy, cosmology, philology, medieval studies, paleography, history of science, psychophysics and linguistics. The humanities scholars uncovered insights into Grosseteste’s work that scientists alone might have missed; the scientists helped identify mathematical, physical and geometrical thinking in De Luce that their peers in the humanities might have overlooked. Professor McLeish says that without its interdisciplinary approach—an apparent novelty that has made funding a challenge—the project would not have been possible: “If you’d let the scientists loose on their own, we’d have come up with nonsense.”