The long debate on why the scientific revolution did not take place before it did is not subject to conclusive resolution, but there is wide support for the view that the Scholastic method, relying too much on conceptual and textual analysis, failed to devote enough attention to experiment and measurement and their relation to theory. Nevertheless, there are areas of science in which purely conceptual work is entirely appropriate, namely the more mathematical sciences, and it is there that medieval science is strongest. Optics and astronomy, in particular, were regarded as actually part of
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