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Lucio Russo Quotes (1944-2025)
Physicist, Mathematician, Scientist
About Lucio Russo
Lucio Russo (22 November 1944 – 12 July 2025) was an Italian physicist, mathematician and historian of science.
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“The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.”
“Euclid … manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.”
“About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings.”
“Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology.”
“Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of distraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses.”
“From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist … is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. … Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?”
“Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.”
“Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal … yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently.”
“The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. … The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.”
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Lucio Russo on Scientific revolution 2 quotes
“Most authors were led to identify the birth of scientific method with what, not by accident, is called the Scientific Renaissance, and that until the nineteenth century the civilization that gave us science was not even considered worthy of that name: it was just a "period of decadence" of Greek civilization.”
Lucio Russo on History of science
“Histories of scientific thought tend to obscure the revolutionary state of knowledge in the age of Archimedes—the Hellenistic period—toning down the differences between it, the natural philosophy of classical Greece two centuries earlier, and even the prescientific knowledge of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.”
Lucio Russo on Science in classical antiquity
“Histories of scientific thought tend to obscure the revolutionary state of knowledge in the age of Archimedes—the Hellenistic period—toning down the differences between it, the natural philosophy of classical Greece two centuries earlier, and even the prescientific knowledge of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.”
About Lucio Russo
Lucio Russo (22 November 1944 – 12 July 2025) was an Italian physicist, mathematician and historian of science.