What Robert Grosseteste has to teach us about the universe...and multidisciplinary education

Robert Grosseteste: An interesting Thinker

A thirteenth-century depiction of the geocentric cosmos.
L'image Du Monde by Gossuin de Metz, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The Economist's Babbage blog recently published an interesting piece on Robert Grosseteste. Calling him “an intellectual giant,” the piece not only lauded the English scientist, philosopher, mathematician, and theologian, but it also turned some modern scholarship on his work into a morality tale. 

Robert Grosseteste is a terribly interesting figure. He was one of the earliest significant thinkers to read both Aristotle and his Islamic commentators.  His masterwork on light, De Luce, used Aristotle’s naturalistic approach in an attempt to develop unified physical laws to explain the universe’s origin and form. Of course, as a thinker of his time—Grosseteste served as Bishop of Lincoln—the universe he sought to explain was a medieval, geocentric universe; his thinking (or at least his explanations) in many ways bounded by the Catholic Church’s cosmological views. At least partially as a result, he avoided some of the more radical implications of his work. This avoidance can be seen most glaringly, for example, in that not one of his surviving treatises "discusses the possibility of other forms of universe, however close he came to implying it in his cosmogony." The Papal edict of 1277 banned teaching that more than one universe might exist. 

Still, the heavens and Earth he described are fascinating. 

De Luce, the first work to posit a single set of physical laws to account for the different structures of the heavens and Earth, predates Newton’s unifying concept of gravity by hundreds of years. His use of Aristotle’s approach departed significantly from his peers’ (and Aristotle’s) by turning the same physics of light and matter that explain why ordinary, Earth-bound objects onto the cosmos as a whole[i].

Though his approach was heavily influenced by Aristotle and the Greek’s naturalistic approach to discovery, Grosseteste offered an explanation that is sharply at odds with his predecessor’s famous nihilo ex nihilo—nothing can come from nothing. According to Grosseteste, an initial explosion of a primordial sort of light, lux expands the Universe into an enormous sphere, thinning matter as it goes.

Grosseteste, from this position, assumed that matter had a minimum density at which it becomes 'perfected' into a sort of crystalline form. This perfection occurs first at the outer edge of the cosmos, where matter crystallizes into the outermost sphere of the medieval cosmos. This perfect matter then radiates inward. But it’s no longer lux, but lumen, a different kind of light capable of producing a force that ‘pushes’ matter as it radiates. The research team points to the inward propagation of shock waves in a supernova explosion as an analogous process found in our contemporary understanding of physics.


At this point in his theory, the finite ratio of infinite sums returns as a 'quantization condition'.  The researchers from The Ordered Universe Project compare the way this rule allows for only a discrete set of solutions to the way our current understanding of atoms’ behavior is constrained by various energy levels. What that means is that applying Grosseteste’s theory to our universe will produce a finite number of spheres. There were nine perfect spheres in the medieval geocentric cosmos for which he had to account: the 'firmament', the fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Grosseteste’s theory called for taking this system and doubling the density of the second sphere, tripling the density of the third, and so on, to produce a nested set of spheres (see graphic below).

Artistic rendering of Robert Grosseteste's nine-sphere universe.

Ingeniously, Grosseteste’s theory postulates that as the center of the universe is approached unperfected matter becomes dense enough and the inwardly radiating lumen weak enough that no further ‘transitions’ (or ‘perfection’ of matter) are possible. He thus accounts for the Aristotelian distinction between the perfect heavens and the imperfect Earth and atmosphere.

The Ordered Universe Project team added calculus and the computing technology to Grosseteste’s “remarkably precise…formulation of physics” and the six physical 'laws' he detected. The team were then expressed those laws in mathematical terms (including concepts that we now understand that were not understood in Grosseteste’s lifetime—such as opacity—so long as the concepts were consistent with his text even if those concepts were not explicitly found in Grosseteste’s original work).

The result is spectacular. 

The team of scholars was about to produce a “rich set of solutions” from Grosseteste’s work. “A narrow set of parameters did indeed produce the series of celestial perfected spheres and, within the Moon's orbit, a further four spheres corresponding to fire, air, water and earth — as the medieval world view demanded. But most choices of the four parameters yielded no spheres, or a disordered mess of hundreds of concentric spheres with no radial pattern to their densities. Other possible model universes contained infinite numbers of spheres, some with unbounded density.”

It’s amazing how interesting an old, obviously outdated view of the universe can be. While we’re all aware that any geocentric model of the universe has been rendered absolutely untenable by telescopic observations, the Ordered Universe Project researchers point out that in 1225, Grosseteste’s  “was the simplest theory consistent with the observations.” They also remind us that his magisterial effort points to the “limitations of our own current cosmological theory, with its reliance on intangible factors such as 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'.” 

Beyond the limits of our power for observation, I’m also interested in the way ideology shapes the way we interpret what we see. Charlie Munger points to the danger of ideology in ways that are instructive not just to understanding how astronomers like Tycho Brahe’s let their worldview influence their cosmological theories, but how all of us are subject to biases that shape what we think about what we see.

A ‘Model’ 21^st Century Workforce?

Charlie Munger is as interested—perhaps more interested—than anyone in cultivating multidisciplinary education. The Ordered Universe Project team’s work on Grosseteste holds some interesting implications for how we think about multidisciplinary education.  To return to the Economist’s invective against what it takes to be the ‘irksome’ view that “if schools simply focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)—at the expense of frivolous ‘non-scientific’ subjects—then a model 21st-century workforce would magically materialize.

The Economist, instead, argued that taking a cross-disciplinary approach will yield novel, interesting, and superior results than work done when researchers who think of themselves only as scientists use only scientific methods.

The researchers working on the project agree, arguing, “the translation of De Luce is an exemplar of the importance of collaborations between the arts and sciences, of thinking and learning together in new ways, and a reminder that the intellectual tradition we now call science has a long and rich history.” Their collaboration was ‘transformational,’ forcing the scholars “to engage with different ideas and problems.” Despite challenges in getting accustomed to the ways their colleagues thought and the different vocabularies they used to express their thoughts, they stated that, “our expectations changed. At the start of the project we had hoped for a sharper understanding of the text; we were surprised when new science emerged as well.”

Charlie Munger On Multidisciplinary Education

Munger’s address at the Fiftieth Reunion of Harvard Law School’s Class of 1948 is a clarion call to remake our (elite) educational institutions. What Munger wants is a truly multidisciplinary education. I won’t go into the details, but in that address he asks (and, not surprisingly, answers) five simple questions:

1)   Do broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill?

2)   Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary?

3)   In elite broadscale soft science, what is the essential nature of practicable best-form multidisciplinary education?

4)   In the last 50 years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?

5)   What educational practices would make progress faster?

Munger has, to my view, had an outsized influence on helping push elite institutions in this country nearer toward the multidisciplinary vision he has in mind. Places like Stanford and Duke not only attempt to provide a multidisciplinary education, they also attempt to tell everyone about it.  Yale offers a course in ‘grand strategy’. New York Times editorialist David Brooks articulates why ‘grand strategy’ is so important in his piece ‘Saving the System.’ His argument is interesting[ii], but I’m even more fascinated in the fact that ‘grand strategy’ is getting taught at all. And how institutions are recognizing, a la Charlie Munger, that what people learn (and what we try to teach them) needs to be more connected. Not too many people who aren’t Munger acolytes use the terms ‘latticework’ or ‘mental models,’ but they do gesture in his direction.

Multidisciplinary Education for Business Schools?

A recent Wall StreetJournal article highlighted a similar multidisciplinary trend in Business Schools. “Most business-school students are gunning for jobs in banking, consulting or technology.” The piece stated. “So what are they doing reading Plato?”

WSJ mentioned a handful of schools in which the philosophy departments are “invading” the M.B.A. programs. Taking a page out of Munger’s book, (and spurred on by the global financial crisis) these institutions are trying to train business students to think beyond the bottom line. With “courses like ‘Why Capitalism?’ and ‘Thinking about Thinking,’ and readings by Marx and Kant,” these schools are asking their students to think about business in a broader context. Employers, they argue, are concerned with the spate of graduates who “are trained to solve single problems but often miss the big picture.”

Business School Courses and Readings

Munger has been famously critical of business schools, once responding to a question that asked about the wisdom in a particular business transaction by saying, “That was a foolish thing to do, but they can’t help it: some of them went to business school.”

What Would Munger Think About All This Multidisciplinarity?

You might think that Munger would be thrilled that his ideas are enjoying the popularity that they are. But I don’t. In fact, he might not even be thrilled if he thought all of these places were getting it right. Which I’d doubt. Munger is an unabashed elitist when it comes to multidisciplinarity in education (note the ‘Elite’ in his forth question. It’s not there by accident) and in psychology, stating, “I don’t think it’s good teaching psychology to the masses. In fact, I think it’s terrible.”

I understand Munger’s elitism. I do take issue with it—at least in part. But, setting that aside for now, I think he’d probably object on other grounds. And I’m inclined to agree with him on those.

I recently had the good fortune of corresponding with a man who has thought a lot about Munger’s ideas regarding multidisciplinary education. I didn’t ask about any particular attempt to realize Munger’s practice, but did ask what he thought about the possibility of doing so & wondered why more people don’t try.

No Dice.

He wasn’t sanguine about the effort. He thought the academic world is so woefully inadequate that when institutions try to be multi-disciplinary, their efforts “usually cause more harm than good.” He thought this was so because of academia’s tendency to divide the world into specialties. He understood this impulse, because not to do so would make the world and its complex systems too hard to understand. 

But this legitimate practice has a horrible side-effect: slicing up the world this way “fools most people into thinking that’s how the world works. It doesn’t, it’s holistic, linked, one,” he argued. “Universities think that by partially re-joining a couple of specialties back together, and labeling it as ‘multi-disciplinary’, they’ve accomplished something.  But they are still so very far from the true threshold of required understanding as to kidding themselves.”

So, what did he think it really takes to get the kind of latticework Munger wants?

He used a metaphor: the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle. People who “can complete [the NYT crossword puzzle] must have massive knowledge across multiple domains: the English language, literature, pop culture, etc.  Bring anything less than that broad domain base of understanding, and it can’t be done.  This metaphor is a good one because people recognize this as a simple up or down proposition - you either have sufficient knowledge or you don’t.  If you don’t, no dice.”

As for all these recent attempts at institutionalizing multidisciplinarity? I’d suspect Munger would argue: no dice.

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[i] Aristotle’s distinction between the perfect celestial and imperfect earthly realms led to the problem of why, if atoms are point-like (as they were considered at the time to be), then how is it that materials have volume? Light, from this perspective, was considered a medium for filling space. Grosseteste’s theory provided an explanation for why matter had bulk and why that bulk was stable. His idea was that light operates on matter the way two infinite sums can produce a finite ratio. 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ...etc. expresses an infinite sequence; 0.5 + 1 + 2 + 4 + …does, too. Grosseteste took the first of these and divided it by the second, to produce a finite value of 2. Though contemporary mathematicians point out that he didn’t work through the limits that are necessary to make this mathematically rigorous, the gist of his argument is clear—simultaneously adding to both numerator and denominator will produce a finite ratio.

[ii] The explicit argument in Brooks’s New York Times Op-Ed is that our liberal pluralistic system and the freedoms it affords aren’t natural—we’ve got to protect them. Moreover, because it’s difficult to “get people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway places,” finding ways to protect it isn’t an easy task. Worse, because there’s a bunch of bellicosity in a ton of places today, those interested in keeping the kind of political leader that wants to achieve regional dominance and establish cultural and political uniformity at bay will be increasingly difficult.