Lucio Russo Quotes

#1. 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.

Lucio Russo

#2. 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.

Lucio Russo

#3. 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.

Lucio Russo

#4. 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.

Lucio Russo

#5. 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?

Lucio Russo

#6. 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.

Lucio Russo