Today, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and cyberspace. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them. Robert Grosseteste was
born in 1168 and educated in the cathedral school at Oxford, in
medieval England. He was as near to being a scientist as that
world had to offer. When Oxford became a university in 1215, he
was its Grosseteste was an Aristotelian in a Platonist world.
Historian Margaret Wertheim tells us he lived a very strict
monastic life, but he had Aristotle's talent for scientific
observation. He looked for God's perfection, but he did so in
the For Grosseteste, God was light. Understanding light meant
understanding God. And since light followed the rules of Euclid,
the way to light and to God was through geometry. It was
Grosseteste who first figured out that a rainbow wasn't just
reflected light, it was refracted light. Light is bent in the
mists that form rainbows the same wa