STEM subjects and a thirteenth-century masterclass: the Economist has an article on the Ordered Universe and the work we have been conducting on the medieval multiverse. Grosseteste’s contemporary view of multiple universes came not as a cosmological question, but as one of the divine power – if God is omnipotent he could create other universes (with no further inquiry as to whether these would be similar or different to the one we live in now); the question was explored at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with refutation of Aristotle’s insistence that a universe is singular. So, all of this is a very long way from the modern theory of multiverse – and we do not suggest that Grosseteste in any way anticipated that! However, the exercise of following Grosseteste’s description of the formation of the sphere, using modern computational techniques, overlays the theories of modern cosmology on the 13th century in thought-provoking ways.
