Robert Grosseteste launched the science of optics, which was known as perspectiva, and he drew out diagrams and used mathematics to try to show how we see things; but he saw light as the cause of everything, something from God that multiplies itself and produces matter that takes up space in the world. His geometry was a way to put the intangible on paper, to get a physical grip on mystery; physical fact and spiritual visions were both in his mind.27 Roger Bacon thought optics was a useful science precisely because it gave men access to the miraculous in nature. ‘There are,’ he writes, ‘an
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