Science and mathematics

The programs assign science in the original, which almost nobody else does: not textbooks about Newton but the Principia itself, worked through proposition by proposition at St. John’s and Thomas Aquinas College. The premise is that a scientific book is an argument like any other and can be read as one.

The Greek shelf is Euclid, whose Elements is the model of proof; Aristotle’s Physics and treatises on animals, which held for eighteen centuries; Archimedes, Apollonius and Ptolemy, whose Almagest fitted the heavens to circles. Lucretius’s poem is the atomism the Middle Ages lost. Then the revolution: Copernicus moved the earth, Kepler found the ellipses, Galileo rolled the balls and saw the moons, Harvey traced the blood, Bacon and Descartes wrote the methods, and Newton finished it.

The nineteenth century is Darwin, on five lists, and Faraday, Lavoisier and the founders of chemistry and electromagnetism. The twentieth is Einstein, Poincaré on what science can claim, and the biologists after Darwin. Most of these are on the Great Books of the Western World shelf, which includes three volumes of science, and at St. John’s, where the laboratory sequence reads them all. Start with the Origin, which has no mathematics and one idea.