Grosseteste’s De luce in many senses pays homage to earlier cosmological conceptions, Aristotelian and neo-Platonic, and it reveals a wide range of sources. The cosmological scheme which he explores, a geocentric universe, with ten spheres, nine perfect spheres above the moon, and four imperfect spheres below (Grosseteste bundles all of these imperfect spheres together and counts them as one) has its origins in Aristotelian theory, taken on in ancient cosmology by Ptolemy and others. The ten spheres are the contribution of arabic commentary on these earlier traditions (al-Farabi d.951, al-Haytha d.1040 and al-Bitruji d.1204, amongst others). Grosseteste’s universe begins with an instantaneous expansion from a single point of light, light is self-replicating and is able, by virtue of this property to extend matter – thus body, the conjunction of form and matter, corporeity, is formed. How the rest of the universe takes shape he then explains as the continual in-dwelling and compression of light within the spheres. It is this action that our physicists and cosmologists: Richard Bower, Tom McLeish and Brian Tanner have been able to model.
Using Richard’s modern cosmological toolkit to create a mathematical translation of this section of the treatise has created a fabulous, wide and dynamic range of interpretations for Grosseteste’s universe, or multiverses…and the whole paper is available at the Arxiv site. The research enshrines our conviction of Grosseteste as a creative and supple thinker, who was extremely precise in his thinking and expression; and the inspiration that his work can still inspire if we take both what he said, and how (and when) he said in in conjunction. We’re delighted by coverage of the paper and its implications, to colleagues at Science News, Ciencias Miztas and slashdot – and there will be a feature in the New Scientist as well. What would Grosseteste have thought!