Nicole Oresme's 'On Seeing the Stars (De visione stellarum)': A critical edition of Oresme's treatise on optics and atmospheric refraction, with an introduction, commentary, and English translation

In the middle of the fourteenth century, the renowned natural philosopher Nicole Oresme composed a treatise entitled: De visione stellarum (= On Seeing the Stars). This text appears to be the earliest separate treatise devoted to the study of atmospheric refraction and its deeper implications. A major portion of this dissertation is the formulation of the first critical edition and English translation of this work. Accompanying this edition is a commentary explicating its major themes as well as arguments in support of Oresme's authorship.;The fundamental question Oresme's De visione attempts to answer is: Utrum stelle videantur ubi sint - "Are the stars really where they seem to be?" Using perspectivist optics, Oresme ultimately answered that they are not. Further, he concluded not only the stars but almost nothing is seen where it truly is, calling all visual sense data into doubt. The De visione builds upon the foundations laid by the great perspectivists such as Ptolemy, Alhazen, Bacon, and Witelo on atmospheric optics, but it also goes further. This dissertation argues that one of the more profound scientific discoveries by Oresme is the following. Two centuries before the Scientific Revolution, Oresme proposed the qualitatively correct solution to the problem of atmospheric refraction, that light travels along a curve through a medium of uniformly varying density, and he arrived at this solution using infinitesimals. This solution at this solution using infinitesimals. This solution had even escaped the great 17th century scholar of optics and astronomy, Johannes Kepler, and up to now, the credit for its first discovery has been given to Robert Hooke and its mathematical resolution to Isaac Newton. Oresme's argument concerning the curvature of light is a major milestone in the history of optics and astronomy that was previously unknown to modern scholarship. And it further confirms that Oresme was one of the most innovative scientists of the pre-modern world.