position is clearly defined by Grosserteste at Oxford (1175—1253) whom some have wrongly tried to annex as the remote ancestor of Newton, who always stuck to his attempt to reduce light to the locomotion of mechanical points (corpuscles) against all comers, such as the wave theory. The same cosmological background and the full experimental method are to be found in Al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham (965-1039), al-Shirazi (1236-1311) and his pupil al-Farisi, whose work or approach was known directly in Paris and indirectly at Oxford. This would explain, at any rate, why Goethe would have nothing to do with the view that light travels in straight parallel lines, either approximately in nature, as in the arrival of sunlight on earth, or precisely as nowadays in the laboratory lasar. Goethe insisted on the contrary that light travels as a sphere expanding from a point, according to the inverse square law of propagation, so that every ray or segment was like a cone. His physics of light was therefore concentrated on the study of the image in the medium, the unity of the subject and the object, like the rainbow of al-Farisi and al-Snirazi, and he was at pains to show that the the whole space illuminated by the sun through even the largest window is only the image of the sun, formed inverted except in its dead centre, plus the size of the opening. He demonstrated this with the experiment of taking a square aperture any size and of measuring the size of the image caused by the entry of sun-rays through it. If the image is measured on a surface nine feet from the aperture it will be on every side an inch larger than the aperture itself, an increase that corresponds with the angle of the apparent diameter of the sun.
To bring the argument up to date or to the mid-20th century, I must mention Einstein and Heisenberg, who have in fact expressed themeselves on the Newton-Goethe controversy. Einstein for long years wanted to reconcile the mechanical theory and the field theory or wave theory of light, but on Newtonian terms, i.e. maintaining that scientific theories are models of reality (or nature) rather than models of our human knowledge of it, models of truth (or culture), and that this dualist distinction was sacrosanct. Heisenberg too, pillar of quantum physics and the uncertainty principle, opined that it is very unity of Goethe's theory of colour that is unacceptable to the modern Western physicist.
My conclusion therefore is that the European underground wanted light, the word or breath as the archetypal unity of the thing and the sign, object and subject, macrocosm and microcosm, whereas the official position was determined from the beginning not to recognise any cosmological theory of the unity of matter, life and mind, nature and culture, but to allow as scientific only theories of their simple heterogeneity or equally simple homogeneity.
38 October-December 1983