A certain picture of the history of science runs like this. Science, in the Western world, was
first developed by the ancient Greeks. The science of antiquity fizzled out, however, and
was extinguished during the Dark Ages and the anti-intellectual Middle Ages. With the
Renaissance, ancient science was rediscovered, and was profoundly transformed by the
scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. This revolution established science as we
know it, and this science brought along with it revolutionary change in human possibilities
and our way of understanding the universe. The crucial positive features that made possible
the scientific revolution were the notions of the mathematical description of nature as
central to science, and the centrality of experiment in establishing and choosing between
scientific theories. The crucial negative advance was the rejection of an Aristotelian
understanding of the world, which involved a pseudo-scientific metaphysics that was
incompatible with genuine science.