"Extraordinary, isn't it?" "Middle of the tunisian desert, not a soul in sight, traffic light goes red;" "I stop." "And I won't start again till it goes green." "Deeply meaningful thing, the humble traffic light, in what it says about how we think, about how we encourage people with a productive sense of curiosity." "Take Henry Arthur Bedford Halverson." "He's the fellow who invented the traffic light back in the '20s." "Who knows how long he burnt the midnight oil before he came up with it." "But the payoff came the day he got this:" "the inventor's dream, the patent." "Look." "Every nut and bolt described in glowing detail plus drawings." "This is what you get when you build a better mousetrap or a traffic light or whatever." "And the prize for all that effort?" "Between 16 and 20 years of monopoly to profit from your cleverness, protected from all would-be imitators by this inscrutable legalese." "The rule of law encouraging and protecting the drive to innovate." "Oh, and speaking of driving, excuse me." "In any city in the world-- here in Tunis, for instance-- you'll see that marriage of law and bright ideas." "Business can only go international because everybody sticks to the rules." "And because everybody agrees, what will happen if they don't?" "Under the protection of the law, we've come to expect the benefits of science and technology will continue to carry us along towards ever-higher standards of living." "So we make sure through an educational system that teaches people that the only way to go is up, that the way to succeed is to take nothing for granted, to question everything, always to expect to find a better answer." "As a result, we're basically forward-looking, which is ironic considering how we began by being almost exactly the opposite." "It started just down the road from Tunis with a couple of people here in ancient Carthage" "1,400 years ago as the Roman Empire began to fall apart." "Here a lawyer called Martianus Capella decided to save what he could from the imperial past by putting together the 7 main subjects of roman education into one single book that he thought would stand a better chance of survival and be more use" "in a world where life is bound to become more small-time and local when things fell apart." "He called his 7 subjects his seven liberal arts, and his book was to become all the education there was for the next 700 years." "The other fellow I mentioned was a ex-night-clubber turned bishop called Augustine, and his view of the fall of Rome was, "good riddance"." "He ran this part of the world for the Church, and the book he produced out of all this chaos and confusion" "Was to set christian thinking into a kind of dropout mode for centuries." ""The world isn't worth bothering about," he said." "All this fancy architecture and high living and practical knowledge and imperial glory:" "a load of rubbish... perishable goods." "For Augustine, there was no point in trying to understand this world." "It was the hereafter that mattered, and the only way you were ever going to get to heaven was by turning your back on city life, denying yourself the daily fun and games and leading a thoroughly hair shirt existence." "By the end of the 5th century, when the Vandals were picking their noses in the Forum and wondering what the villa lavatories were for, anybody who had any sense had already taken Augustine's advice and gone off to sit it out in monasteries and caves," "taking with them their papers and their books-- including, of course," "Martianus Capella's little effort-- waiting for darkness to fall on civilization." "Now, it's all very well to say that the Dark Ages which followed the fall of Rome weren't their fault." "The argument goes that this hairy lot, hacking a subsistence out of some tribal clearing in the forest, had their time cut out just keeping warm... and chopping wood." "Never mind using roman roads that led nowhere or amphitheaters with no performers or any of the roman junk rotting quietly in the bushes because it was culturally unsuitable." "Well, it's an argument." "But the plain fact is, early on, they were an uncouth, smelly, dangerous bunch of barbarian louts." "If you came between them and what they were after, something was guaranteed to get their goat." "And once these Vandals, Dupes, Anglo-Saxons, or whatever had settled in and turned Europe into one vast farmyard midden dotted with ruins, well, there was little to do but get drunk and wait for the odd passerby." "Travelers were, however, rare-- well, look at the place-- and tended to be types who weren't too worried about their worthless lives." "Ring a bell?" "For these illiterate boozers of the late 6th century, the occasional monk who happened to interrupt a social evening must have seemed like a visitor from on high." "In fact, on high was just where most monks came from." "Up here, well away from trouble," "Augustine's followers had kept the flame of learning alight in their monasteries, guardians of knowledge in a wilderness of ignorance." "Well, kind of." "Thanks to Augustine, their view of what knowledge was was pretty weird." "I mean, they wouldn't say, "Hmm, here's a red flower."" "They'd say," ""Red for the blood of Christ," ""thorns for the pains of the devil, green for the emerald of sincerity,"" "and so on." "Nothing really existed except as a symbol for something else, something religious." "And the only point in looking at all this would be to remind you of those symbols." "The whole of nature was nothing but a kind of giant, holy cryptogram to be decoded by the faithful." "Turning your back on reality like that was part of the whole escapist thing." "In here, they lived a totally self-contained life." "They might have been on another planet." "The monastic rule gave a detailed schedule for every single aspect of life inside these walls, everything from electing an abbot to how much wine to drink in summer." "Mind you, what reality was there outside that you'd want to let in?" "Look at the way these places are built:" "like fortresses to keep it out." "The principle here wasn't that hard to understand." "Being shut behind these thick walls might not have been much of an existence, but it was preferable to anything else on offer." "The whole monastic experience was a bit like jumping into bed and pulling the blankets over your head." "It was a mystic experience, unreal." "And it all still, hundreds of years after the fall of Rome, looked back to an age of greatness that was gone forever." "Everything these people knew-- and this is extraordinary for us to grasp in our world-- everything they knew was old." "So when this early 7th-century elite nipped off after dinner to pick up the latest in bedtime reading, it was all very medieval Reader's Digest stuff:" "anthologies, compilations, condensations, selections, rewritten and copied over the centuries." "You can see that kind of unreal view of life in the way they took the same weird approach to turning the knowledge into pictures." "The same convoluted playing around with ideas was applied to things like sculpture." "It's all monster animals and nightmare faces." "Even in the really talented work, everything's symbolic, full of double meaning." "Now and again, in the mosaics, you get the odd bit of reality slipping in." "But the main theme is still that only heaven matters." "Below in the earthly world, everything's shown in cartoon view, people, animals, down to a formula with everything in its proper place." "Everything, everybody, belonged where god put them." "Nobody moved." "Well, after several hundred years of hanging on grimly to the old way of doing things, you would expect the grip gradually to loosen, wouldn't you?" "Which is just what happened." "By 700 or so, european intellectual life wasn't worth a candle..." "Until, at the end of the 8th century, things took an encouraging turn for the so-so here in Aachen, Germany." "This cathedral's all that's left of a posh model city thrown up by a 26-year-old womanizing whiz kid keen to put a stop to the Dark Ages' rot, ended up emperor of Europe, crowned by the Pope on Christmas day, 800... name of Charlemagne." "The secret of his success:" "a brain drain." "You see, when he took over in 768, the place was a mess." "The only people in Europe who could read and write were the priests." "And where were they?" "Moonlighting, brawling, boozing, and chasing women." "Charlemagne reached for his secretary and got all the eggheads he could think of, like Alcuin of York, to get over here and get a grip on the general standard of penmanship." "Penmanship?" "You try running an empire from this throne without the bureaucrats to shuffle the parchment, and you won't get far." "So in no time at all, every cathedral and monastery had a free school and inspectors doing the rounds." "The aim:" "standardize the writing and spelling, and you can standardize everything else, and everybody can understand it." "And so this came in, a new handwriting-- small to save parchment, clear to read and easy to write-- called carolingian miniscule." "Ended up as the script we use today as a matter of fact." "But it was the school's Syllabus that interests us." "They used the seven liberal arts-- you remember started by Capella back in Carthage-- still surviving in a few scattered monasteries." "They split the subjects into the facts you need to know:" "music theory for singing hymns, geometry to measure things, arithmetic to add things up, and astronomy for knowing what day it was;" "and how to use the facts:" "grammar for getting it right, rhetoric for putting it in letters, and logic to explain it clearly." "Now, with only seven subjects, the best Charlemagne could do was to try and save what there was." "So they copied everything they could find from the past, just enough copies to survive through what happened next." "Because when Charlemagne died in 814, the rot he had stopped came back in the form of the Vikings, and the lights went out everywhere." "Well, almost everywhere." "By the year 950," "Europe was back on its feet again, all over the place in farmyards, outside monastery walls." "When the Vikings had finally cleared off for good, people started getting together to exchange what they had for what they hadn't, and places that began just as a safe spot to meet gradually became a regular event maybe once a week," "then every day." "By the year 1000, there were little places like this all over the continent, with the beginnings of a local police force to keep the bully boys in order and let people go about their business unmolested." "I say business because that's what was happening as the very first european marketplaces set up shop and life began to be just a shade better than absolutely dreadful." "With money to be made, these marketplaces rapidly turned into small towns, supporting an exciting new way to have fun called "buying things,"" "including, of course, a better diet." "As trade expanded, so did the food supply." "And the better people ate, the better they wanted to eat." "The first inns and hostelries began to appear." "The modern habit of eating out had started." "By the 11th century, all the really fancy buying and selling was going on in Italy." "Well, the towns there had never really gone out of business since Rome, and they all had well-developed estates outside their walls, so everybody ate well." "Sure, they had been clobbered by the barbarians like everybody else, but because of their traditions, they were recovering faster." "And because of those links with Rome, they were very bloody-minded about setting up shop again without any outside interference, thank you." "One such would-be independent was this place," "Bologna." "It's still the same:" "full of money, good food, elegance, streets lined with arcades to keep the weather off the shoppers." "By 1050, Bologna was a bustling, dynamic trading center growing fast, sitting on the main commercial route between southern and northern Europe and doing very nicely out of it." "Like a lot of italian cities at the time, they thought all they had to do was just let it happen." "Unfortunately, it was all happening too fast for their own good." "The birds would soon come home to roost." "It was the bolognese who hit the problem first." "Let me show you why, because the main square here says it all." "Look around it, and you see how the place was carved up between emperor, town council," "Church, and merchants." "All of them wanted to run the place." "None of them were strong enough to do it by themselves." "The emperor:" "chasing all over Europe fighting the Pope for slices of a much bigger cake than this." "The town council:" "a bunch of Johnny-come-lately amateurs who could only keep order by inviting outsiders to become mayor." "And the merchants couldn't see beyond the end of their cash registers." "So with all this argy-bargy going on about who was in charge, humdrum governmental necessities, like taxation, administration, customs and excise, food prices, wage levels, tended to get chucked in the pending tray while much more serious matters," "like who threw the boiling oil, got sorted out." "Boiling oil?" "Why do you think they built those?" "This was a late medieval version of being upwardly socially mobile;" "the higher the tower, the posher the family, giving you the drop on those below." "Bologna had hundreds of these status symbols built by everybody with money, from craftsmen to merchants to soldiers to aristocrats, all wanting their own way." "Trouble was, they were trying to run before they could walk, because they didn't have a legal system that was remotely good enough to handle the complicated lives they were making for themselves." "They had a hodgepodge of barbarian tribal law, local custom, astrology, trial by fire, bits of roman jurisprudence all cobbled together and no good at all for that new social set, people who wanted to sue people," "until a monk called Arenarius, who taught liberal arts here at Saint Stephen's monastery, made an illuminating discovery." "In 1076, he found the great collection of Imperial Roman Law originally put together by the emperor Justinian and lost since the 7th century, more law than you could ever need to run a town with." "And that was the trouble." "The stuff was too sophisticated and complicated even for the literate guys in the pulpit." "I'll show you what I mean with a modern equivalent." ""English commercial law:" ""an action lies in conversion for loss or destruction of goods" ""which a bailee has allowed to happen" ""in breach of his duty to his bailor." ""That is to say it lies in a case" ""which is not otherwise conversion but would have been detinue before detinue was abolished."" "Great." "Except if I don't know what detinue means, a fat lot of use this is to me." "But I may need to use it for my business." "Arenarius' problem was exactly the same." "So like the good grammar teacher he was, he sat down and wrote out explanations of what words like "detinue" meant in the margins." "It's a technique called glossing, and with it, Arenarius explained, codified, organized law for the first time in western Europe." "And as he went along, he turned glossing into a new rudimentary system for thinking something through clearly, a kind of intellectual cross-questioning, if you like." "Unfortunately, there wasn't much else to use it on except law, because, well, you know, their general knowledge was zero until, that is, something very nasty happened in Spain." "Meet don Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar and friends." "Here they are, led by don Rodrigo, better know as "el Cid," the great spanish hero, belting off on a crusade to rescue southern Spain from the clutches of the evil, perverted, treacherous, sadistic Arabs" "who have held it in terrified subjection for 300 years." "Well, that was the official christian version of what they're up to churned out by the Pope to give our brave lads somewhere to go and plunder other than back home." "In other words, they are not what they seem and nor are the evil, perverted, etcetera Arabs they're off to clobber." "Au contraire." "In the Dark Ages when we were still living in pigsties, the spanish-arab capital, Cordoba, had pavements, street lighting, 300 public baths, parks, palaces, 100,000 houses, and two treasures unequaled for urbane sophistication" "anywhere in the known world." "You're looking at one of them." "The most extraordinary mosque in the world, and this is just a corner of it." "Imagine what the mud-hut northerners must have made of this forest of columns and double arch, high-load-bearing architecture, hmm?" "200 years to build, second biggest after Mecca, serving a final city population of 1 million." "The other treasure of Cordoba was a library." "You see, when it was built around 970, the people here had had paper, and all the intellectual activity that implies, for over 200 years." "We were still scratching on animal skins." "So in that library, there were 440,000 books, more than in the whole of France, and there were 69 other libraries in town too." "Small wonder that the spanish Arabs described us as being on a cultural level, from their point of view, with the Sudan." "They were, after all, surrounded by stuff like this." "The Arabs called their bit of Spain Andalucia, and it was both beautiful and wealthy." "They exported gold, silver, rubies, silk, marble, ceramics." "They enjoyed plentiful harvests of the crops they'd originally introduced to Spain:" "aubergines, apricots, pomegranates, peaches, rice, artichokes, sugar, food in abundance thanks to their advanced irrigation techniques and a high level of engineering skills." "While we still lived in filth, the spanish Arabs were enjoying all the comforts technology could provide." "And they used their hydraulic systems to create some of the most beautiful water gardens in history." "In the few brief moments before it all got extremely nasty, arab Spain did come up with a few touches that survived to make our lives a bit more elegant." "They gave us paper, rhyming poetry and rhythmic music, dressing for the seasons, table settings and manners, different courses at meals, and deserts after dinner." "Oh, this lot again." "The worst thing about el Cid and his brotherhood of christian knights was that they weren't christian." "Half of 'em were Arabs." "All of 'em were mercenaries." "Whether el Cid fought Arabs or christians depended on who was paying." "And most of the time, the money was arab." "Because by this date, 1085," "Andalucia was breaking up anyway into petty kingdoms knocking each other off." "So Arabs, they lost." "The great christian crusade:" "great christian propaganda written after the event." "Now, as well as fighting on both sides," "Arabs and christians made other kinds of contact besides the fatal variety." "As likely as not, this muslim had a christian father." "Intermarriage was common along the frontier in places like Toledo, where another great myth didn't happen, the fall of Toledo in 1085." "The christian version goes like this:" "valiant christian troops stormed the impregnable citadel and in the teeth of ferocious opposition took Toledo from their hated and implacable arab enemies." "Well, a lot of the christians had arab relatives, so how implacable can you get with your mother-in-law for a start?" "And then a lot of them were used to coming down here regularly from their dirty northern castles to get their teeth done or, better for all concerned, have a hot bath." "And they fought each other more than the Arabs." "And there were so many political deals going on with the Arabs that the loyalty of the christian troops was at best underwhelming." "How they got inside Toledo was one of those deals." "You see, Alfonso the lady-killer, the incoming christian king, had been here before in rather comfortable exile, and so he already had a few friends here." "And the sitting tenant?" "Well, he wanted out." "Poison was the flavor of the month among his advisors, and he was looking for a safer seat, so Alfonso promised him one." "So the fall of Toledo was more of a nudge of Toledo." "But if you like your history and great moments, don't feel bad;" "there's one coming up, because when the occupying christians settled in, they found something that brought every major scholar in Europe to Toledo like moths to a candle flame." "Because Toledo was the greatest treasure-house of knowledge any of them had ever seen, stuffed with books about science light-years ahead of any of them, mysterious subjects like that." "All they had to do was translate the arabic." "The job was to take 150 years and employ toledan Jews who turned the arabic into spanish for christian scholars able to translate the spanish on into latin for the rest of Europe." "As the translations got under way, the extraordinary truth sank in." "The arab books they were looking at were themselves translations of ancient greek knowledge long given up for lost by the West after the fall of Rome." "Europe had hung on to a few bits and pieces, scraps of philosophy and logic, but nothing like they were getting now." "And it was now that the Europeans got the full measure of the arab civilization they had destroyed, because as the arabic material came through in spanish, it was as if it were still in a foreign language." "The Europeans just didn't know enough to understand the concept being translated or, in many cases, not being translated because a latin equivalent didn't exist." "This was when the arab scientific words we have came into our languages, like "algebra", "zenith", "algorithm"," ""soda", "camphor", "elixir", and one really weird mathematical term nobody had ever heard before." "The translators flooded back over the spanish mountain passes, their pack animals loaded with knowledge that would change the world:" "maths, geometry, astronomy, medicine, biology, botany, anatomy, physics, chemistry, zoology, optics, pharmacology, philosophy, meteorology, engineering, architecture." "By the middle of the 12th century, virtually every major ancient scientific discipline had been found and brought back." "Now, there was only one thing wrong with all this wonderful food for thought coming in over the Pyrenean passes, and that was, it was like an over-rich meal:" "looked great, full of variety, irresistible, and difficult to digest all at once." "Funnily enough, the genius who made it easy to take was an ancient Greek who suffered from heartburn called Aristotle." "In among all the wealth of material coming over from Spain was Aristotle's answer to, well, everything." "He'd written an organized systematic breakdown of all human knowledge." "He had split it into three kinds, practical, productive, and theoretical, and then subdivided them into every possible specialization." "He put everything in its place and showed how it related to everything else." "And then he gave some general rules." "Everything works in a systematic way." "It's not magic." "There's a reason why that rock or this bread or that tree looks the way it does, acts the way it does, why it's here." "And he also said," ""Believe only your own experience." ""There's no fact like a fact learned from your own life."" "Well, just those two remarks blew away Augustine and the "Life is a veil of tears;" "don't study it" point of view, didn't they?" "But Aristotle was heavy stuff." "It was easy to wind people up to go looking for conclusions, but how could you prevent them from jumping to the wrong ones?" "I mean, northern Europeans didn't know good scientific thinking from a hole in the ground." "Well, guess who had the answer for that." "Aristotle, who had a trick for never getting things wrong." "He claimed he invented it, called it logic." "Now, logic's obvious to you a thousand years later, but remember, to them, it was like something from outer space." "It took the mystic fog away from your head and gave you a mind like a knife." "Aristotle said, "Look, what can you say about anything?" ""You can make remarks about everything," ""positive or negative, or something, positive or negative."" "Four kinds of remarks using a special 3-stage argument:" "two things you knew, like skin gets wet;" "wet comes out through holes." "That leads to a third thing you didn't know before:" "wet skin has holes." "Even if you can't see them, you know they must be there." "Logically, they have to be." "Now, that special 3-stage argument was called a syllogism." "And with it, Aristotle's system of knowledge and the greek and arab data all put together, life in Europe was never gonna be the same again, because what a mainframe computer can do to the problem of 2 and 2," "it could do to those piddling difficulties of those people in Bologna." "By this time, Bologna was already attracting people to its law school from all over Europe." "You wanted to get ahead, law was the only exam worth swatting for." "And then, sometime in the last quarter of the 12th century, the translations arrived and blew everything apart." "The massive new knowledge from Spain hit this little teaching center like a ton of intellectual bricks and turned it into one of the major institutions in the modern world, a university." "Because there were so many students now, they decided they'd do better going for package deals in bigger numbers, so they organized." "First thing they did was to set themselves up in groups by nationality and find a place to live." "This was one, the college for students from Spain." "As a matter of fact, it still is." "Those are students' rooms." "Then they set up a student council to hire and pay the teachers, set the rate for renting books, because they were too expensive to buy, and accommodation charges." "They scheduled three lectures a day, split the year into three terms, and got special privileges from the town council on account of all the money they were bringing in." "After 6 years' hard grind, you were tested on a set text." "And if you passed, there was a public ceremony where you got a degree and a ticket to the front row in life, because it meant you could teach anywhere." "But the biggest effect of all this wasn't just to turn out the first university degrees." "It was how it opened the door to a new way of thinking." "With the earlier question-and-answer approach to law they'd had plus Aristotle's system for fail-safe logical analysis plus the incredible amount of new raw fact pouring in from Spain, it began to seem possible to look at nature in a way totally different" "from the old medieval, mystical approach." "The new data they were getting, everything from meteorology to medicine, opened up nature to examination and showed them that it had a kind of rational system to it." "Now, if that was true and this really blew their minds, then maybe people could understand how it worked, and the fact that most of the new information came from pre-christian times gave it a less supernatural," "more practical, hardheaded feel, exactly the kind of thinking that makes a lawyer successful when the law is complicated, and they did nothing to make it simple." "You only have to look at their textbooks." "Look, here's one." "Here's a teacher giving the lecture, here's the text of the law they're studying, here's a gloss explaining the text, and here's a gloss explaining the gloss." "And so we got the universities and the professional qualified specialists the modern world couldn't do without thanks to Bologna." "We got a lot more than that, though, when somebody else tried doing the same thing further north in France." "But before I go, one last little touch:" "you remember way back I said the big wheels who ran this place had their palaces around the square?" "Well, there was a fifth one added, the palace of the lawyers." "Meanwhile in France, the Church had started letting congregations get involved in the eucharist ceremony recalling the body and blood of Christ." "The idea was that everybody should be allowed to eat the bread, even bring their own to the service." "The problem was, in the new mood of rationalism, doubts were being cast on the central mystery of the mass." "When the priest drank the wine, did it turn into the blood of Christ, as the faithful were to believe?" "Because if it didn't and the Pope said it did," "Church authority was going to get questioned elsewhere." "If this crucial ceremony was meaningless, then the faithful weren't going to go on doing what the Church told them." "It looked to the Pope like time for some action." "The word went out to the bishops:" "take a hard line, crack the whip a little, make life tough for anybody asking questions they shouldn't." "But things were to get a lot tougher thanks to the subversive literature the translators were bringing back from Spain down these quiet french country roads." "Put yourself in the Pope's place, and you'll see why." "Here we were, all over Europe, settling down to a bit of law and order, little kingdoms growing, trade on the up-and-up, bit of cash to take to market, even travel the roads without getting your throat slit." "And here come these lunatic traveling academics stirring things up with their questions." "And some of them were right over the top." "I mean, Peter Abelard, for instance, actually came out with a book of 168 quotes from Church fathers showing that they all contradicted each other." "And his motto," ""Don't just accept anything you're told." "If you don't understand it, don't believe it"" "was nothing short of revolutionary." "I mean, Church authority was based on the very stuff he was picking holes in." "And then two of this radical bunch called William and Thierry did something that in the 12th century was absolutely unthinkable." "They took the Bible apart." "Thierry went around saying that Genesis was all wrong, that the world could not really have been created in six days, because that wasn't natural." "And his mate William came right out and said that Eve hadn't been made from one of Adam's ribs, because that's not how people got made." "And the worst of it was, most of these people were graduates of one of the best schools in the country, where this kind of dangerous stuff-- dangerous if you didn't keep it to yourself-- was far from low profile." "You can actually see the physical shape that kind of thinking took from here." "Well, you could hardly miss it." "There it is, Chartres cathedral." "If you think back to what went before, you get a feel for the knockout effect these gothic cathedrals had when they went up." "They used the latest arab construction techniques." "We call them pointed arches." "And the development of pointed arch gives you vaulting like this, let's you support a really high roof." "The other support was flying buttresses, and what the did was take all the stress off the sides and let you fill them with glass." "Chartres cathedral must have felt as if it had no walls." "Thanks to the buttresses, they were able to surround the worshippers with no less than 186 stained glass windows." "In keeping with the new rationalism, the whole place was like an encyclopedia in glass and stone." "All over the exterior, they put the new kind of sculpture." "No more mumbo jumbo, abstract designs but real people doing real things you saw around you in everyday life." "The holy figures were all still there, but now they had human features and clothes, even the ones with wings." "And there, public proof that factual knowledge about the world ought now to be regarded as an aid to faith not an obstacle, where the sculptured portraits of the great scholars of the past as well as figures representing the subjects being taught" "in the basic course at the cathedral school." "Over the great west door of the building on the Royal portal, the architects of Chartres put Martianus Capella's seven liberal arts." "So when Paris university got going in 1200 on the left bank of the Seine, you could say the rationalist rot had set in, because Paris, unlike Bologna, was supposed to train theology graduates in an atmosphere protected from radical new ideas." "Well, you can guess how long it took for that plan to fall apart." "By 1210, the Pope had banned Aristotle and arab books, and the students were on strike for six years." "Rome sent in the Dominican friars as a kind of intellectual riot troops, and that didn't work either." "Trouble was, logic had become a cult subject and one you just couldn't suppress." "Things went from bad to freethinking." "In 1230, the first copies of a new book by an arab called Ibn Rushd from Cordoba, actually-- started turning up, under plain wrapper, of course:" "full-scale Aristotle plus commentary, the works." "It explained the universe like this:" "in the beginning, god sets everything up systematically so it carries on by itself in a predetermined way, no need for further intervention by god, no way to change it, so no choice, no free will." "Even god can't fiddle with it, like he can't make the internal angles of a triangle add up to more than 180°." "Now, this limitations on god stuff was dynamite:" "more strikes, more bans." "1/3 of the student body was attending bootleg Aristotle courses run by a fanatic freethinker called Siger of Brabant, who was calling for nothing less than total freedom of thought all around." "Well, half a loaf and all that, the Church compromised." ""Okay," they said, "there'll be two kinds of truths:" ""revealed truth you get from belief" ""and theology and the Church," ""and everyday truth about the ordinary world you get from reason and philosophy."" "Well, that let some light in in more senses than one, especially through the Church windows." "I've already mentioned how everybody was amazed by this new high-tech stained glass." "But there was more to it than just brightening the place up." "The new optical science from Spain had got some of the more adventurous thinkers all excited about light, how it spread out in a perfect sphere from a source, how it always went in straight lines, how it had to be the basic material god had used" "to make the universe." "So these great windows were also experimental instruments used by their designers to play with the way light behaved-- in a very simple way, you understand-- but for the first time in terms of measurement, observation, cause and effect," "not just mystical awe." "By the end of the 13th century, the old augustinian disregard for the world was gone to be replaced by an increasing curiosity to get behind the mystical quality of nature and find out how it all worked." "In 1304, a Paris graduate, a german priest called Theodoric of Freiberg, took the decisive step and did what everything had been building up to." "He decided to find out how one of the most mysterious forms of light actually worked." "And he did it in a way that seems so modernist, it would be almost incredible for the period, because Theodoric took on the rainbow." "About all that was known about it at the time, thanks to the Arabs, was that they thought it was caused by reflecting raindrops." "But why the colors happened nobody knew." "What was incredible about the way Theodoric did it was that he used laboratory models to test his theories." "He used these glass spheres and bottles of water and the sun to try to reproduce the effect he'd seen by staring very close-up though a dewdrop." "So he got his spherical flask, filled it with water, and took a closer look." "What he'd seen were four colors:" "red, yellow, green, and blue, as you moved your eye across the drop or moved the drop." "After months of thinking and rethinking-- you'll remember, that was the scholastic way-- he came up with this:" "the light wasn't reflecting at all." "It was coming in, hitting, refracting, reflecting, and refracting again." "And it was that refraction that caused the colors to spread out." "What's more, the more obliquely it came in, the more obliquely it went out." "And according to where your eye was, you either saw red light or yellow or green or blue." "Theodoric put it all together in a manuscript that still exists, and it looks something like this:" "in the sky, droplets at various heights, you looking, sunlight hitting at various angles, but your eye only seeing from here, red light, from here, yellow light, from here, green light," "from here, blue light, which is why the rainbow looks like it does, like this:" "Theodoric's experiment with light, the first of its kind in Europe, brought a total and radical change in the way we looked at things." "See, earlier civilizations had always looked back to a golden age, to the good old days, all that." "Not anymore." "Where Augustine had said, oh, 800 years before," ""Believe, and then you'll understand,"" "now it was the other way around:" ""Give me the facts, and I'll think about it."" "People started to look forward, to think in terms of maybe being able to do something to make tomorrow better than yesterday." "It was the view that brought us the world of change we live with today, where science brings us the new product of our curiosity before we've gotten used to the old ones." "Thanks to Theodoric and the medieval universities, we live with a rate of change so high that if you understand something today, that means it must already by definition be obsolete." "And if we find that increasingly hard to live with, how much harder for the Third World as we come roaring in with our instant technology to do to them what Aristotle and the spanish translators did to us," "only we're doing it overnight."