text:
Two New Sciences

The Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze ) published in 1638 was Galileo Galilei's final book and a scientific testament covering much of his work in physics over the preceding thirty years. It was written partly in Italian and partly in Latin.

After his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Roman Inquisition had banned the publication of any of Galileo's works, including any he might write in the future. After the failure of his initial attempts to publish Two New Sciences in France, Germany, and Poland, it was published by Lodewijk Elzevir who was working in Leiden, South Holland, where the writ of the Inquisition was of less consequence (see House of Elzevir). Fra Fulgenzio Micanzio, the official theologian of the Republic of Venice, had initially offered to help Galileo publish in Venice the new work, but he pointed out that publishing the Two New Sciences in Venice might cause Galileo unnecessary trouble; thus, the book was eventually published in Holland. Galileo did not seem to suffer any harm from the Inquisition for publishing this book since in January 1639, the book reached Rome's bookstores, and all available copies (about fifty) were quickly sold.

Discourses was written in a style similar to Dialogues, in which three men (Simplicio, Sagredo, and Salviati) discuss and debate the various questions Galileo is seeking to answer. There is a notable change in the men, however; Simplicio, in particular, is no longer quite as simple-minded, stubborn and Aristotelian as his name implies. His arguments are representative of Galileo's own early beliefs, as Sagredo represents his middle period, and Salviati proposes Galileo's newest models.

Introduction
The book is divided into four days, each addressing different areas of physics. Galileo dedicates Two New Sciences to Lord Count of Noailles. In the First Day, Galileo addressed topics that were discussed in Aristotle's Physics and also the Aristotelian school Mechanics. It also provides an introduction to the discussion of both of the new sciences. The likeness between the topics discussed, specific questions that are hypothesized, and the style and sources throughout give Galileo the backbone to his First Day. The First Day introduces the speakers in the dialogue: Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio, the same as in the Dialogue. These three people are all Galileo just at different stages of his life, Simplicio the youngest and Salviati, Galileo's closest counterpart. The Second Day addresses the question of the strength of materials.

The Third and Fourth days address the science of motion. The Third day discusses uniform and naturally accelerated motion, the issue of terminal velocity having been addressed in the First day. The Fourth day discusses projectile motion.

In Two Sciences uniform motion is defined as a motion that, over any equal periods of time, covers equal distance. With the use of the quantifier ″any″, uniformity is introduced and expressed more explicitly than in previous definitions.

Galileo had started an additional day on the force of percussion, but was not able to complete it to his own satisfaction. This section was referenced frequently in the first four days of discussion. It finally appeared only in the 1718 edition of Galilei's works. and it is often quoted as "Sixth Day" following the numbering in the 1898 edition. During this additional day Simplicio was replaced by Aproino, a former scholar and assistant of Galileo in Padua.

Summary
Page numbers at the start of each paragraph are from the 1898 version, presently adopted as standard, and are found in the Crew and Drake translations.

Day one: Resistance of bodies to separation
[50] Preliminary discussions. Sagredo (taken to be the younger Galileo) cannot understand why with machines one cannot argue from the small to the large: "I do not see that the properties of circles, triangles and...solid figures should change with their size". Salviati (speaking for Galileo) says the common opinion is wrong. Scale matters: a horse falling from a height of 3 or 4 cubits will break its bones whereas a cat falling from twice the height won't, nor will a grasshopper falling from a tower.

[56] The first example is a hemp rope which is constructed from small fibres which bind together in the same way as a rope round a windlass to produce something much stronger. Then the vacuum that prevents two highly polished plates from separating even though they slide easily gives rise to an experiment to test whether water can be expanded or whether a vacuum is caused. In fact, Sagredo had observed that a suction pump could not lift more than 18 cubits of water and Salviati observes that the weight of this is the amount of resistance to a void. The discussion turns to the strength of a copper wire and whether there are minute void spaces inside the metal or whether there is some other explanation for its strength.

[68] This leads into a discussion of infinites and the continuum and thence to the observation that the number of squares equal the number of roots. He comes eventually to the view that "if any number can be said to be infinite, it must be unity" and demonstrates a construction in which an infinite circle is approached and another to divide a line.

[85] The difference between a fine dust and a liquid leads to a discussion of light and how the concentrated power of the sun can melt metals. He deduces that light has motion and describes an (unsuccessful) attempt to measure its speed.

[106] Aristotle believed that bodies fell at a speed proportional to weight but Salviati doubts that Aristotle ever tested this. He also did not believe that motion in a void was possible, but since air is much less dense than water Salviati asserts that in a medium devoid of resistance (a vacuum) all bodies—a lock of wool or a bit of lead—would fall at the same speed. Large and small bodies fall at the same speed through air or water providing they are of the same density. Since ebony weighs a thousand times as much as air (which he had measured), it will fall only a very little more slowly than lead which weighs ten times as much. But shape also matters—even a piece of gold leaf (the densest of all substances [asserts Salviati]) floats through the air and a bladder filled with air falls much more slowly than lead.

[128] Measuring the speed of a fall is difficult because of the small time intervals involved and his first way round this used pendulums of the same length but with lead or cork weights. The period of oscillation was the same, even when the cork was swung more widely to compensate for the fact that it soon stopped.

[139] This leads to a discussion of the vibration of strings and he suggests that not only the length of the string is important for pitch but also the tension and the weight of the string.

Day two: Cause of cohesion
[151] Salviati proves that a balance can not only be used with equal arms but with unequal arms with weights inversely proportional to the distances from the fulcrum. Following this he shows that the moment of a weight suspended by a beam supported at one end is proportional to the square of the length. The resistance to fracture of beams of various sizes and thicknesses is demonstrated, supported at one or both ends.

[169] He shows that animal bones have to be proportionately larger for larger animals and the length of a cylinder that will break under its own weight. He proves that the best place to break a stick placed upon the knee is the middle and shows how far along a beam that a larger weight can be placed without breaking it.

[178] He proves that the optimum shape for a beam supported at one end and bearing a load at the other is parabolic. He also shows that hollow cylinders are stronger than solid ones of the same weight.

Day three: Naturally accelerated motion
[191] He first defines uniform (steady) motion and shows the relationship between speed, time and distance. He then defines uniformly accelerated motion where the speed increases by the same amount in increments of time. Falling bodies start very slowly and he sets out to show that their velocity increases in simple proportionality to time, not to distance which he shows is impossible.

[208] He shows that the distance travelled in naturally accelerated motion is proportional to the square of the time. He describes an experiment in which a steel ball was rolled down a groove in a piece of wooden moulding 12 cubits long (about 5.5m) with one end raised by one or two cubits. This was repeated, measuring times by accurately weighing the amount of water that came out of a thin pipe in a jet from the bottom of a large jug of water. By this means he was able to verify the uniformly accelerated motion. He then shows that whatever the inclination of the plane, the square of the time taken to fall a given vertical height is proportional to the inclined distance.

[221] He next considers descent along the chords of a circle, showing that the time is the same as that falling from the vertex, and various other combinations of planes. He gives an erroneous solution to the brachistochrone problem, claiming to prove that the arc of the circle is the fastest descent. 16 problems with solutions are given.

Day four: The motion of projectiles
[268] The motion of projectiles consists of a combination of uniform horizontal motion and a naturally accelerated vertical motion which produces a parabolic curve. Two motions at right angles can be calculated using the sum of the squares. He shows in detail how to construct the parabolas in various situations and gives tables for altitude and range depending on the projected angle.

[274] Air resistance shows itself in two ways: by affecting less dense bodies more and by offering greater resistance to faster bodies. A lead ball will fall slightly faster than an oak ball, but the difference with a stone ball is negligible. However the speed does not go on increasing indefinitely but reaches a maximum. Though at small speeds the effect of air resistance is small, it is greater when considering, say, a ball fired from a cannon.

[292] The effect of a projectile hitting a target is reduced if the target is free to move. The velocity of a moving body can overcome that of a larger body if its speed is proportionately greater than the resistance.

[310] A cord or chain stretched out is never level but also approximates to a parabola. (But see also catenary.)

Additional day: The force of percussion
[323] What is the weight of water falling from a bucket hanging on a balance arm onto another bucket suspended to the same arm?

[325] Piling of wooden poles for foundations; hammers and the force of percussion.

[336] Speed of fall along inclined planes; again on the principle of inertia.

Methodology
Many contemporary scientists, such as Gassendi, dispute Galileo's methodology for conceptualizing his law of falling bodies. Two of the main arguments are that his epistemology followed the example of Platonist thought or hypothetico-deductivist. It has now been considered to be ex suppositione, or knowing the how and why effects from past events in order to determine the requirements for the production of similar effects in the future. Galilean methodology mirrored that of Aristotelian and Archimedean epistemology. Following a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615 Galileo distinguished his arguments and Copernicus' as natural suppositions as opposed to the "fictive" that are "introduced only for the sake of astronomical computations," such as Ptolemy's hypothesis on eccentrics and equants.

Galileo's earlier writing considered Juvenilia, or youthful writings, are considered his first attempts at creating lecture notes for his course "hypothesis of the celestial motions" while teaching in at the University of Padua. These notes mirrored those of his contemporaries at the Collegio as well as contained an "Aristotelian context with decided Thomistic (St. Thomas Aquinas) overtones." These earlier papers are believed to have encouraged him to apply demonstrative proof in order to give validity to his discoveries on motion.

Discovery of folio 116v gives evidence of experiments that had previously not been reported and therefore demonstrated Galileo's actual calculations for the Law of Falling Bodies.

His methods of experimentation have been proved by the recording and recreation done by scientists such as James MacLachlan, Stillman Drake, R.H. Taylor and others in order to prove he did not merely imagine his ideas as historian Alexandre Koyré argued, but sought to prove them mathematically.

Galileo believed that knowledge could be acquired through reason, and reinforced through observation and experimentation. Thus, it can be argued that Galileo was a rationalist, and also that he was an empiricist.

The two new sciences
The two sciences mentioned in the title are the strength of materials and the motion of objects (the forebears of modern material engineering and kinematics). In the title of the book "mechanics" and "motion" are separate, since at Galileo's time "mechanics" meant only statics and strength of materials.

The science of materials
The discussion begins with a demonstration of the reasons that a large structure proportioned in exactly the same way as a smaller one must necessarily be weaker known as the square–cube law. Later in the discussion this principle is applied to the thickness required of the bones of a large animal, possibly the first quantitative result in biology, anticipating J. B. S. Haldane's work On Being the Right Size, and other essays, edited by John Maynard Smith.

The motion of objects
Galileo expresses clearly for the first time the constant acceleration of a falling body which he was able to measure accurately by slowing it down using an inclined plane.

In Two New Sciences, Galileo (Salviati speaks for him) used a wood molding, "12 cubits long, half a cubit wide and three finger-breadths thick" as a ramp with a straight, smooth, polished groove to study rolling balls ("a hard, smooth and very round bronze ball"). He lined the groove with "parchment, also smooth and polished as possible". He inclined the ramp at various angles, effectively slowing down the acceleration enough so that he could measure the elapsed time. He would let the ball roll a known distance down the ramp, and use a water clock to measure the time taken to move the known distance. This clock was "a large vessel of water placed in an elevated position; to the bottom of this vessel was soldered a pipe of small diameter giving a thin jet of water, which we collected in a small glass during the time of each descent, whether for the whole length of the channel or for a part of its length. The water collected was weighed, and after each descent on a very accurate balance, the differences and ratios of these weights gave him the differences and ratios of the times. This was done with such accuracy that although the operation was repeated many, many times, there was no appreciable discrepancy in the results."

The law of falling bodies
While Aristotle had observed that heavier objects fall more quickly than lighter ones, in Two New Sciences Galileo postulated that this was due not to inherently stronger forces acting on the heavier objects, but to the countervailing forces of air resistance and friction. To compensate, he conducted experiments using a shallowly inclined ramp, smoothed so as to eliminate as much friction as possible, on which he rolled down balls of different weights. In this manner, he was able to provide empirical evidence that matter accelerates vertically downward at a constant rate, regardless of mass, due to the effects of gravity.

The unreported experiment found in folio 116V tested the constant rate of acceleration in falling bodies due to gravity. This experiment consisted of dropping a ball from specified heights onto a deflector in order to transfer its motion from vertical to horizontal. The data from the inclined plane experiments were used to calculate the expected horizontal motion. However, discrepancies were found in the results of the experiment: the observed horizontal distances disagreed with the calculated distances expected for a constant rate of acceleration. Galileo attributed the discrepancies to air resistance in the unreported experiment, and friction in the inclined plane experiment. These discrepancies forced Galileo to assert that the postulate held only under "ideal conditions," i.e., in the absence of friction and/or air resistance.

Bodies in motion
Aristotelian physics argued that the Earth must not move as humans are unable to perceive the effects of this motion. A popular justification of this is the experiment of an archer shooting an arrow straight up into the air. If the Earth were moving, Aristotle argued, the arrow should fall in a different location than the launch point. Galileo refuted this argument in Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He provided the example of sailors aboard a boat at sea. The boat is obviously in motion, but the sailors are unable to perceive this motion. If a sailor were to drop a weighted object from the mast, this object would fall at the base of the mast rather than behind it (due to the ship's forward motion). This was the result of simultaneously the horizontal and vertical motion of the ship, sailors, and ball.

Relativity of motions
One of Galileo's experiments regarding falling bodies was that describing the relativity of motions, explaining that, under the right circumstances, "one motion may be superimposed upon another without effect upon either...". In Two New Sciences, Galileo made his case for this argument and it would become the basis of Newton's first law, the law of inertia.

He poses the question of what happens to a ball dropped from the mast of a sailing ship or an arrow fired into the air on the deck. According to Aristotle's physics, the ball dropped should land at the stern of the ship as it falls straight down from the point of origin. Likewise the arrow when fired straight up should not land in the same spot if the ship is in motion. Galileo offers that there are two independent motions at play. One is the accelerating vertical motion caused by gravity while the other is the uniform horizontal motion caused by the moving ship which continues to influence the trajectory of the ball through the principle of inertia. The combination of these two motions results in a parabolic curve. The observer cannot identify this parabolic curve because the ball and observer share the horizontal movement imparted to them by the ship, meaning only the perpendicular, vertical motion is perceivable. Surprisingly, nobody had tested this theory with the simple experiments needed to gain a conclusive result until Pierre Gassendi published the results of said experiments in his letters entitled De Motu Impresso a Motore Translato (1642).

Infinity
The book also contains a discussion of infinity. Galileo considers the example of numbers and their squares. He starts by noting that: It cannot be denied that there are as many [squares] as there are numbers because every number is a [square] root of some square:

1 ↔ 1, 2 ↔ 4, 3 ↔ 9, 4 ↔ 16, and so on.

(In modern language, there is a bijection between the elements of the set of positive integers N and the set of squares S, and S is a proper subset of density zero.) But he notes what appears to be a contradiction: "Yet at the outset we said there are many more numbers than squares, since the larger portion of them are not squares. Not only so, but the proportionate number of squares diminishes as we pass to larger numbers."

He resolves the contradiction by denying the possibility of comparing infinite numbers (and of comparing infinite and finite numbers): "We can only infer that the totality of all numbers is infinite, that the number of squares is infinite, and that the number of their roots is infinite; neither is the number of squares less than the totality of all numbers, nor the latter greater than the former; and finally the attributes 'equal,' greater,' and 'less,' are not applicable to infinite, but only to finite, quantities." This conclusion, that ascribing sizes to infinite sets should be ruled impossible, owing to the contradictory results obtained from these two ostensibly natural ways of attempting to do so, is a resolution to the problem that is consistent with, but less powerful than, the methods used in modern mathematics. The resolution to the problem may be generalized by considering Galileo's first definition of what it means for sets to have equal sizes, that is, the ability to put them in one-to-one correspondence. This turns out to yield a way of comparing the sizes of infinite sets that is free from contradictory results.

These issues of infinity arise from problems of rolling circles. If two concentric circles of different radii roll along lines, then if the larger does not slip it appears clear that the smaller must slip. But in what way? Galileo attempts to clarify the matter by considering hexagons and then extending to rolling 100 000-gons, or n-gons, where he shows that a finite number of finite slips occur on the inner shape. Eventually, he concludes "the line traversed by the larger circle consists then of an infinite number of points which completely fill it; while that which is traced by the smaller circle consists of an infinite number of points which leave empty spaces and only partly fill the line," which would not be considered satisfactory now.

Reactions by commentators
"So great a contribution to physics was Two New Sciences that scholars have long maintained that the book anticipated Isaac Newton's laws of motion."

"Galileo ... is the father of modern physics—indeed of modern science"

Part of Two New Sciences was pure mathematics, as has been pointed out by the mathematician Alfréd Rényi, who said that it was the most significant book on mathematics in over 2000 years: Greek mathematics did not deal with motion, and so they never formulated mathematical laws of motion, even though Archimedes developed differentiation and integration. Two New Sciences opened the way to treating physics mathematically by treating motion mathematically for the first time. The Greek mathematician Zeno had designed his paradoxes to prove that motion could not be treated mathematically, and that any attempt to do so would lead to paradoxes. (He regarded this as an inevitable limitation of mathematics.) Aristotle reinforced this belief, saying that mathematic could only deal with abstract objects that were immutable. Galileo used the very methods of the Greeks to show that motion could indeed be treated mathematically. His idea was to separate out the paradoxes of the infinite from Zeno's paradoxes. He did this in several steps. First, he showed that the infinite sequence S of the squares 1, 4, 9, 16, ...contained as many elements as the sequence N of all positive integers (infinity); this is now referred to as Galileo's paradox. Then, using Greek style geometry, he showed a short line interval contained as many points as a longer interval. At some point he formulates the general principle that a smaller infinite set can have just as many points as a larger infinite set containing it. It was then clear that Zeno's paradoxes on motion resulted entirely from this paradoxical behavior of infinite quantities. Renyi said that, having removed this 2000-year-old stumbling block, Galileo went on to introduce his mathematical laws of motion, anticipating Newton.

Gassendi's thoughts
Pierre Gassendi defended Galileo's opinions in his book, De Motu Impresso a Motore Translato. In Howard Jones' article, Gassendi's Defence of Galileo: The Politics of Discretion, Jones says Gassendi displayed an understanding of Galileo's arguments and a clear grasp of their implications for the physical objections to the earth's motion.

Koyré's thoughts
The law of falling bodies was published by Galileo in 1638. But in the 20th century some authorities challenged the reality of Galileo's experiments. In particular, the French historian of science Alexandre Koyré bases his doubt on the fact that the experiments reported in Two New Sciences to determine the law of acceleration of falling bodies, required accurate measurements of time which appeared to be impossible with the technology of 1600. According to Koyré, the law was created deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments. In fact, Galileo's water clock (described above) provided sufficiently accurate measurements of time to confirm his conjectures.

Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling bodies (actually rolling balls) were replicated using the methods described by Galileo, and the precision of the results was consistent with Galileo's report. Later research into Galileo's unpublished working papers from 1604 clearly showed the reality of the experiments and even indicated the particular results that led to the time-squared law.

title: Two New Sciences


text:
User talk:Alcien

Greetings! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you have questions or doubts of any sort, do not hesitate to post them on the Village Pump, somebody will respond ASAP. Other helpful pages include: Have fun! --Jiang 23:21 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
 * Welcome, newcomers
 * How does one edit a page
 * Manual of style
 * Naming conventions

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:Alcien


text:
Talk:Burning Man

Cacophony's members, early visionaries, and current times
One of my concerns here is that several founders of Burning Man find no fame or glory here. For those of us closer to the founders, we know the whole idea was formed and took shape at meetings at 1907 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco. The huge rambling 2-story flat in San Francisco was home and guest house to several people who were intimately involved with the creation of Burning Man. In case it isn't obvious, friendships suffered when some people turned out to love the glory more than others.

A chief architect of the Burning Man vision was the great doyenne, Roberta "P" Segal, who in true, gender-driven diminution and historical refab, first envisioned and authored the tenets of Burning Man. Another person who stylized and created the original silk screened swag for the parties of 40 at Baker Beach and elsewhere, Chris de Monterey, is also left out of the evolutionary tale of Burning Man.

The Cacophony Society still meets, at least several people still do, in San Francisco on the first Saturday of each month (It is currently Sept. 2022). More than this, Ms. Segal has gone on to a new vision, post several thousand dollars per ticket, in the quest for creative essence; she has created an artist's housing project in San Francisco so the arts can be reborn and San Francisco can once again be a flourishing artist's center. 157.131.246.221 (talk) 05:24, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Visionary P Segal needs to mentioned as a founder of Burning Man
It is well known within the community of early participants, that the ideas for Burning Man were discussed and evolved at 1907 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, where visionary P Segal was involved along with a small handful of others, some who continued with it, and some who did not as Burning Man took on a life of it's own. There are some remarkable photos out there, but I am not sure if they are available for use from those years. Another early member was Chris de Monterey, who silk screened the first tickets to Baker Beach events. 157.131.199.58 (talk) 01:42, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It's not Wikipedia's job to give people fame and glory, and "creative essence" sounds unsanitary. EEng 18:49, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

2023 rain-out and fake news
Flooding has closed the entrance this year source. I was curious if it's ever rained on Burning Man before? Apparently there was also a hoax claiming an Ebola outbreak source. Beland (talk) 03:52, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

 * I'm not sure about previous rain events but this one I think should probably be included in the history section. - Reallygreatoaktree (talk) 13:36, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * According to social media, it's not a hoax. The Feds have quarantined the camp due to the outbreak of the highly contagious, flesh-eating disease.  They're not letting anyone in and out.  Complete media blackout like they've tried to do in Maui. 152.130.11.77 (talk) 17:06, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 * you mean Brace Belden? He is trolling. Also, complete media blackout isn't possible considering people bring Starlink and other satellite internet to these places. Synopsis19117 (talk) 03:26, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Added mention of the hoax to the 2023 article. Still curious if rain has happened before. -- Beland (talk) 16:58, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

malicious edits
There have been a series of malicious edits, from the same IP address, changing from "festival" to toilet on fire", changing things to feces, etc. Whitis (talk) 00:47, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

 * Sounds like appropriate changes that reflect the reality. It's a cesspool. 91.148.90.17 (talk) 01:33, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

stated goals vs reality
"community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" are the stated principles of burning man and doesn't necessarily reflect reality. it looks to me like the page is being edited by certain groups affiliated with burning man. Synopsis19117 (talk) 11:45, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Hedonism and paganism
, I take your point about blogs being a poor source. I've re-written with books as a source, though honestly they are janky-seeming books that might be nearly self-published. But, they are by commentators (Ben Shapiro, James Goll and Lou Engle) recognized enough to have their own Wikipedia articles. I'm opening this thread to discuss if this is adequate sourcing. Jno.skinner (talk) 23:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
 * , thanks, those sources are a bit better than the blog an at least the authors have articles. It would be nice to find better sources, but I'm fine with letting the section stand as you have written it.  Other editors will likely have opinions and will hopefully improve that section.  Cxbrx (talk) 00:21, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Burning Man


text:
User talk:H0004534

Greetings! If you have questions or doubts of any sort, do not hesitate to post them on the Village Pump, somebody will respond ASAP. Other helpful pages include: Have fun! --Jiang 23:27 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
 * Welcome, newcomers
 * How does one edit a page
 * Manual of style
 * Naming conventions

title: User talk:H0004534


text:
Walter Mildmay

Sir Walter Mildmay (bef. 1523 – 31 May 1589) was a statesman who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer to Queen Elizabeth I, and founded Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Origins
He was born at Moulsham in Essex, the fourth and youngest son of Thomas Mildmay, later auditor of the Court of Augmentations under Henry VIII, by his wife Agnes Read. As the Commissioner for receiving the surrender of the monasteries at the Dissolution, his father Thomas made a large fortune and in 1540 acquired the manor of Moulsham, near Chelmsford in Essex, where he built a fine mansion.

Collateral line
Walter's elder brother Sir Thomas Mildmay (d. 1566) of Moulsham, was auditor of the Court of Augmentations, established in 1537 for allocating the property taken by the Crown from the monasteries. He was buried in Chelmsford Church, where his monument survived in 1878. Sir Thomas Mildmay was the grandfather of Sir Thomas Mildmay, 1st Baronet (d. 1626), created a baronet in 1611, and of Sir Henry Mildmay (d. 1654), a knight. Henry claimed, in right of his mother Frances Radcliffe, a daughter of Henry Radclyffe, 2nd Earl of Sussex, 3rd Baron FitzWalter (1507–1557), the barony of FitzWalter, and on 10 February 1670 his grandson Benjamin Mildmay, 17th Baron FitzWalter (c. 1646–1679), was summoned to the House of Lords by that title. Benjamin's two sons were Charles Mildmay, 18th Baron FitzWalter (1670–1728) and Benjamin Mildmay, 1st Earl FitzWalter, 1st Viscount Harwich, 19th Baron FitzWalter (1672–1756), the latter being further created Viscount Harwich and Earl FitzWalter in 1730. On Earl FitzWalter's death in 1756, the earldom became extinct and the barony fell into abeyance.

Career
Mildmay was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, but apparently failed to take his degree. He later became a student of law at Gray's Inn (1546), and there obtained some employment under his father in the Court of Augmentations. When the Court of Augmentation was reconstituted, about 1545, Mildmay was made one of its two surveyors-general. During Edward VI's reign, Mildmay extended his official connection.

On 22 February 1546/47 he was knighted, and on 14 September prepared, along with three others, an inventory of the late King's wardrobe. Sixteen days later he was appointed a commissioner to report upon the Crown revenues. In 1548 he acted on commissions for the sale of lands (March) and for the maintenance of such grammar schools as had belonged to the dissolved chantries. After the Duke of Somerset's arrest he was ordered by the Privy Council on 12 November 1549, to examine the Palace of Westminster, which had been in the Duke's custody, and, on 8 March 1550/51, to take charge of the Duke's property at Syon House.

For his services, he received many grants of land in Gloucestershire and Berkshire, some of which he exchanged for manors in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire; other grants of land in Cornwall, Essex and London soon followed. He fixed his country residence at Apethorpe Palace, Northamptonshire, which was granted to him in 1552, and was confirmed to him in 1556. When in London he lived in the parish of St Bartholomew-the-Great.

Mildmay soon proved himself a skillful financier. In 1550 he was directed, together with the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert, to examine the accounts of the King's mints, and in 1551 superintended the establishment of a new mint at York. In December 1551 he was a commissioner to inspect the Courts which controlled the Crown lands.
 * On 2 January 1552 he was commissioned to levy the King's debts;
 * On 21 November to settle with the Crown accountants the effect of a fall in the value of money;
 * In December to audit the funds belonging to the king's officers; and
 * In that and the next year he superintended the receipt by the crown of plate, jewels, bells, and the like surrendered by dissolved monasteries or chantries.

Mildmay was elected MP for Lostwithiel in 1545, for Lewes in 1547 and Maldon on 1 March 1553, and then for Peterborough on 5 October 1553. Although a committed Calvinist, Queen Mary's accession did not appreciably depress his fortunes, and before her death he was employed on Government business. On 9 January 1558, he was appointed treasurer of the forces sent to the relief of Calais and was chosen as knight of the shire to represent Northamptonshire in the parliament meeting in January 1557; after this he represented that constituency eight times until his death.

Under Queen Elizabeth, with whom he regularly exchanged New-Year's gifts, his influence steadily grew. On her accession he was at once made treasurer of her household, and was appointed a member of a small committee of ways and means to supply the empty exchequer. He was soon employed in preparing a census of the farms of the royal revenues (22 December 1558), in examining Queen Mary's grants of land, in compounding with those who refused knighthood (28 March 1559), in directing the issue of a new coinage (29 October 1560), and in selling crown lands (May 1563).

On 21 April 1566, Sir Richard Sackville, the chancellor of the exchequer, died, and Mildmay was appointed as his replacement; he was also made auditor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Occupied in the duties of his offices until his death, he concerned himself little with general politics. As the brother-in-law of Francis Walsingham and the friend of Lord Burghley, he was, however, always heard with attention in the Privy Council, the Star Chamber, and in Parliament. He used what influence he possessed to shield the Puritans from the attacks of the bishops, and often urged the Queen to intervene on behalf of the Protestants in the Low Countries. In his speeches in Parliament he argued that a liberal grant of subsidies placed the government under an obligation to redress grievances, and thus identified himself with the popular party in the commons.

In 1572 he helped to prepare evidence against Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, who, nevertheless, after his condemnation gave him some rich jewels. His nephew Sir Christopher Peyton was appointed Auditor General of Ireland in 1584.

The affairs of Mary, Queen of Scots, also occasionally occupied his attention. When she arrived in England in 1567 he strongly advised her detention. In October 1577 he and Cecil visited her at Chatsworth, after she had announced that she had important secrets to reveal to Elizabeth.

In 1586, he went to Fotheringhay Castle and informed her of her forthcoming trial, in which he took part as one of the special commissioners. In March 1587 he urged the condemnation of William Davison in the Star Chamber. Although four times nominated an ambassador to Scotland, in 1565, 1580, 1582, and 1583, he was on each occasion detained at home, but when his name was suggested for the office in 1589, James VI expressed great readiness to receive him. Mildmay's illness, however, brought the suggestion to nothing. Mildmay died at Hackney on 31 May 1589, and is buried beside his wife in the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great in London, where an elaborate monument exists to his memory. The decorations are heraldic, but the Latin epitaph merely records names and dates. The tomb was restored in 1865 by Henry Bingham Mildmay.

Epitaphs on Mildmay and Sir John Calthrop were licensed by the Stationers' Company on 29 July 1589. They are not known to be extant.

Founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Mildmay displayed his interest in education with much effect. On 23 November 1583 he purchased for £550 the site of Cambridge Blackfriars, a dissolved house of the Dominican Order, which was situated in what was then called Preachers Street, but is now known as St Andrew's Street. On 11 January 1584, he obtained the Queen's licence to set up Emmanuel College there.

The architect was Ralph Symons, and in 1588 the new building was opened with a dedication festival, which Mildmay attended. He installed in the college a master, Laurence Chaderton, three fellows, and four scholars; but subsequent benefactions soon increased the fellowships to fourteen and the scholarships to fifty. According to Thomas Fuller, Mildmay, on coming to court, after the college was opened was addressed by the Queen with the words: "Sir Walter, I hear you have erected a puritan foundation", to which Mildmay replied: "No, madam; far be it from me to countenance anything contrary to your established laws; but I have set an acorn, which when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof".

His statutes for the government of Emmanuel College are dated 1 October 1585 and are attested by his sons, Anthony and Humphrey, John Hammond, LL.D., William Lewyn, LL.D., Thomas Byng, LL.D., Timothy Bright, M.D., and Edward Downing. Mildmay deprecated perpetual fellowships, and warned the fellows against regarding the college as "a perpetual abode" — they were to look forward to spreading outside the knowledge they acquired within its walls.

Mildmay otherwise showed his interest in education by acting as an original governor of Chelmsford Chantry School, now King Edward VI Grammar School, founded in 1550–1; by giving an annuity of 52s. to Christ's Hospital (10 April 1556); and by bestowing £20 a year on Christ's College, Cambridge (10 March 1568 – 1569), to be expended on a Greek lectureship, six scholarships and a preachership to be filled by a fellow of the college. He also contributed stone for completing the tower of Great St Mary's Church, Cambridge, and he helped to found the free-school at Middleton, Lancashire.

There are three portraits of Mildmay at Emmanuel College; one with his wife. A fourth painting was at Moulsham Hall, demolished in 1809, near Chelmsford, and a fifth at Knole, Sevenoaks. There are also engravings by J. Faber and E. Harding, and an unsigned plate is known.

Character and publications
Sidney Lee wrote that Mildmay was a man of cultivation and of great piety, with some popular reputation as a believer in second sight. Henry Caesar, dean of Ely, was directed by the Star Chamber to retract a report that he had circulated to the effect that Mildmay had endeavoured to see by conjuration the person of Cardinal Pole after his death.

Henry Roberts, in his Fames Trumpet Soundinge (1589), mentions a book by Mildmay, and describes it as "in print now extant". It was entitled A Note to know a Good Man. Sir John Harington, in his Orlando Furioso, bk. xxii, p. 175, gives a stanza in Latin with an English translation; the former he says he derived from Mildmay's Latin poems, which are not otherwise known. A "memorial" by Mildmay, written for his son Anthony in 1570, consisting of sensible moral precepts, was printed from a manuscript at Apethorpe by the Rev. Arundell St John-Mildmay in 1893. Many of his official letters and papers are at Hatfield or in the state paper office.

Marriage and issue
Mildmay married Mary Walsingham (died 16 March 1576), a daughter of William Walsingham by his wife Joyce (or Joice), a daughter of Edmund Denny, a Baron of the Exchequer, and a sister of Sir Francis Walsingham. By his wife he had issue including:
 * Sir Anthony Mildmay (d.1617), of Apethorpe, eldest son and heir, an ambassador to France, who married Grace Sharington by whom he had one daughter Mary Mildmay.
 * Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury Place, Essex, father of Sir Henry Mildmay;
 * Winifred Mildmay, wife of Sir William Fitzwilliam of Gains Park, Essex;
 * Martha Mildmay, wife of Sir William Brouncker;
 * Christiana Mildmay, wife successively of Charles Barrett of Aveley in Essex, and Sir John Leveson of Kent, Knight.

title: Walter Mildmay


text:
Talk:The Canon of Medicine

Untitled
Is the Persian word qanun actually a cognate of our word canon? 131.183.73.174 23:35 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)

 * Arabic, actually. It means "law". And I believe it's not the cognate, but the root/origin.

 * Really odd that the full Arabic name of the work is no listed at all. I am guessing it was Al Qanoon Al Tibb —iFaqeer | Talk to me! 08:54, Oct 2, 2004 (UTC)

Where are these books please? m.

It seems that instead of Galen, a picture of Ibn Sina/Avicenna should be pictured first, as he is the compiler. Shouldn't there be a Ibn Sina/Avicenna picture first? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.7.25.145 (talk) 05:18, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Print avalibility
Is this work still in print? The article makes no mention. -- 01:51, 28 January 2008 (UTC)Auric (talk)

Assessment
Along with biographies, academic journals, and hospitals, works of chiefly historical importance are usually rated "Low" by the medicine project. This doesn't mean that they weren't important at the time, just that improving an article on this subject is a low priority for the project when compared to (for example) articles on current diseases. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:22, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

 * While I agree with your assessment, I noticed that Hippocrates was of high-importance, whereas Galen does not have any Wikiproject Medicine template at all. I don't see how Galen and Avicenna are any less important, so I'm curious as to why this is? Does it have something to do with Hippocrates being a featured article? Regards, Jagged 85 (talk) 18:50, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Translation
This article says that Gerard of Cremona translated The Canon into Latin but the article about him clearly states that he has been mistakenly credited and mentions another Gerard Cremonensis as the translator. Does anybody have more insight? Lathrop1885 (talk) 18:22, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Avicenna Worship
Even skimming this article, one notices a tendency toward Avicenna-veneration (also evident in the main Avicenna article). Although no-one is denying the man's achievements, for he had many, this article should be about the document itself, and *not* how wonderful Avicenna was for coming up with this or that. Example: - Ibn Sina contributed inventively... - ...he used to pioneer the idea of... - Avicenna was the first to describe the... - Avicenna's contribution to the...

Again, not that any of these are unremarkable by themselves, but that they all occur within the span of 3-4 sentences. Indeed, for most of the article, almost every single paragraph begins with "Avicenna ....." - and this is NOT an article on Avicenna, it is an article on a single document. It ends up reading like fanboy work, which is unfortunate. I've added the coatrack tag and the "too long" tag. Glacialfury (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 02:24, 11 November 2008 (UTC).

This isn't fanboy work, it's rabid religion disguised as 'science'. Apparently 'the qanun' describes most modern medical practices including cancer treatment!

Taditional Knowledge Digital Libarary
This is a type of Database generated by India Govt to protect country ancient knowledge —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.212.91.131 (talk) 11:08, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Volume size in Chinese version is different to what is written here.....
and verification is needed--222.67.208.20 (talk) 04:33, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

If anyone can access to the following article, please add the info to this article http://www.ceps.com.tw/ec/ecjnlarticleView.aspx?atliid=286907&issueiid=22254&jnliid=2883 --222.67.208.20 (talk) 04:40, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

neutral source ?
Well its better than what we have here AVICENNA x. Medicine and Biology J8079s (talk) 22:09, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Stub and rework
For background information, please see RFC/U and Cleanup. With 205 edits, User:Jagged 85 is the main contributor to this article by far (2nd: 7 edits). The issues are a repeat of what had been exemplarily shown here, here, here or here. As the last pre-Jagged85 version (06 June 2007) is itself unreferenced I stubbed the article completely. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 18:49, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Personally I think it was a mistake to unstub this article. Unfortunately other editors have now clearly spent a significant amount of time working on the unstubbed article. I have added back the Jagged_85 tag, anyway, so at least there's a warning.
 * Although the Canon was clearly important in medieval Western medicine, there is so much dubiously sourced Jagged_85 hyperbole that I am very uncertain what is reliable and what is not. E.g. "Henceforth the Canon served as the chief guide to medical science in the West". Really? It was the chief guide to medical science from the instant it was translated till 1650 or so? Displacing Galen? What about al-Razi? This stuff is so over the top it detracts from the whole article. If anyone else has time to look at toning it down (using good sources) it would be much appreciated. If anyone else has the energy to go through Jagged_85's edits it would be very much appreciated. I guess I'll look at this after Avicenna. When you consider there's al-Razi etc. still to go, the task is pretty monumental, and this is several years in. --Merlinme (talk) 11:26, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

reverts by User:Al-Andalusi

 * This edit claims "not what the source says" The source  cites the work of A C Crombie   who tells us that Avicenna's 7 rules: They were taken in part from Galen. Neither source says  first book dealing with  (first is always a wp:Redflag) evidence-based medicine and experimental medicine (evidence-based medicine and experimental medicine are much older than Avicenna (or not nearly as old depending on the POV)

I will WP:AGF and allow them time to undo or correct their revert. J8079s (talk) 04:51, 20 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Galenic medicine is a very common term and really needs no citation however here's one any way; This  was uncalled for.
 * I'm not disputing the term "Galenic medicine" per se. Rather, it's your opinionated Euro-centric attempt to dismiss the whole enterprise of Islamic medicine as nothing other than commentaries on Galen (or Ancient Greek medicine), a claim that has been refuted by modern scholarship. Also, Avicenna incorporated in this work Ancient Indian, Ancient Persian and maybe Chinese medicinal knowledge, but you probably don't care about them either. Al-Andalusi (talk) 02:58, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

points of agreement: Points for discussion: Point of disagreement: My points are these: WP:Assume good faith J8079s (talk) 07:43, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) Galenic medicine is a common term for medicine of the period.
 * 2) calling the Canon "a translation with commentaries" would not be accurate.
 * 3) The role of the Canon is large
 * 1) Galens' role in the Canon is Primary See Iranica The Canon. Galen (and Hippocrates as presented by Galen) had generally dominated Islamic medicine from its beginnings. Galen’s positive ideas about anatomy, physiology, disease, and treatment of disease have the pride of place in the Canon, as they do in all of Islamic medicine.  AVICENNA x. Medicine and Biology Also A full text version of the Canon is available on line  Galen is named many times
 * 2) Persian, Indian, and Chinese may play a trivial role in the Canon but I have found no source to tell us what part of the Canon they can be found in. If I do I will add them whether I care or not.
 * whole enterprise of Islamic medicine: Ibn Khaldun tells us Galen is the leading ancient authority on medicine. His works have been translated (into Arabic). He is said to have been a contemporary of Jesus and to have died in Sicily on his wanderings while in voluntary exile.  His works on medicine are classics which have been models for all later physicians. He goes on father down the page; The medicine mentioned in religious tradition is of the (Bedouin) type. It is in no way part of the divine revelation. (Such medical matters) were merely (part of) Arab custom and happened to be mentioned in connection with the circumstances of the Prophet, like other things that were customary in his generation. They were not mentioned in order to imply that that particular way of practicing (medicine) is stipulated by the religious law. Muhammad was sent to teach us the religious law. He was not sent to teach us medicine or any other ordinary matter.
 * 1) There is nothing Islamic inherent in in either type.
 * 2) You seem to want to build a new type of medicine based solely on contributions from Muslims.
 * 3) What have you got against Galen?
 * 4) What have you got against the Greeks? Romans? Jews? Christians?

 * I'm amused at the hypocrisy displayed here; preaching "AGF" in the very same paragraph where you wrote: "What have you got against the Greeks? Romans? Jews? Christians?" and made accusations of making up stuff. Your post is a good example of WP:OR as there are really no valid arguments presented here. But even worse are the distortions: I never said nor implied anything close to the claim that "Galenic medicine is a common term for medicine of the period". Ibn Khaldun's views regarding the medicine practiced in early Islam (7th-century Arabia) were presented as though they describe that of Avicenna's period. You also conveniently left this part out: "There have been leading physicians in Islam of surpassing skill [over Galen], such as, for instance, ar-Razi, al-Majusi,and Avicenna".
 * "Islamic medicine", "Arabic medicine" or a variation of both are the terms used in academia to refer to the tradition of medicine developed in Muslim countries. But it seems that you are strongly disputing this established fact to the point of accusing other editors of making it up. Please don't spam Wikipedia with such views, and the above scribble won't help. When in doubt, see WP:FRINGE. Al-Andalusi (talk) 03:22, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
 * "Greco-Islamic" and Greco-Arabic are also quite common. I a sorry you choose to "edit war" over this. We probably need a different venue as this may be going beyond the scope of The Canon of medicineJ8079s (talk) 04:24, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Both of which are entirely different than just calling it "Galenic medicine" as you insist. But I guess it's too late for you, given that you've already exposed your bigotry above. Al-Andalusi (talk) 18:25, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
 * That the "Canon" is the most influential Galenic document of the Middle Ages [] should not be taken as an attempt to falsify any other construct.

Islamic medicine as a target page in wikipedia;1)re-directs are to be avoided. 2) there are two types of medicine that could be construed as Islamic readers should not be forced to follow the link. These are technical issues and should not be taken as endorsing or condemning any WP:POV J8079s (talk) 22:49, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I have used "medicine" for grammar, if you feel it must say Islmaic use this construct: {{Medicine in the medieval Islamic world|Islamic medicine thank youJ8079s (talk) 16:18, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

why the lede needs to change
The construction encyclopedia of Islamic medicine "encyclopedia" is an WP:Easter egg "Islamic medicine" is a redirect to the same page Medicine in the medieval Islamic world. Medicine in the medieval Islamic world ⋅needs to be linked in the lede. The page has other problems mostly technical. Substantial changes should use talk.J8079s (talk) 04:24, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Canon's massive overhaul
I have selected Canon of Medicine for editing because it was such an important medical text and the wikipedia article has very little concerning its actual content. This book was the textbook in medicine for hundreds of years and is even in use in smaller capacity today. I think this text deserves a closer inspection, and I intend on adding significant detail to the Wikipedia article.

I have found an English translation of the source material. Because of having access to this source, mistakes have been made very obvious. For example, many of the headings and chapters are misnamed or completely out of order.

I intend on laying out as much of the book as possible and giving a brief overview of what is in it. It is also my intention to find additional photos and other third party sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paullittle1979 (talk • contribs) 11:32, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

I have been filling out content material so that we have a complete overview of the Canon. I have desired to post pictures of the source material in Arabic, however each page is indiscernible from the next. There are no pictures, diagrams, or such. So I'm coming to the decision that showing additional photos would be superfluous.

In the meantime, I am reading critical responses to Canon to bridge the content material with it's reception in a historical concept. How did it differ Canon differ from Galen's medical volumes? How did it differ from Hippocrates or Aristotle?

Presentist wording
Presentist wording has been a major issue in the past in articles relating to science in Medieval Islam. A lot of that content was removed with the Jagged_85 cleanup a few years ago. This article still has some content which reads to me as grafting modern terminology onto a thousand year old text, specifically: Because presentist wording is sometimes also found in the sources, I'm not sure what the best course of action is here.Dialectric (talk) 11:55, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology as a section heading
 * The statement that "The Canon of Medicine deals with evidence-based medicine, experimental medicine,[51] clinical trials, randomized controlled trials,[52][53] efficacy tests,[54][55] risk factor analysis, and the idea of a syndrome in the diagnosis of specific diseases.[56]" from the Book 2 (materia medica) section.

Improvements & Expanding
This is really well fleshed out so far. I have no suggestions on how to improve this more. I can't wait to see how User:Paullittle1979 improves books 3-5. Theboywiththednatattoo (talk) 03:03, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

The Canon of Medicine makes one of the earliest references to headaches caused by perfume odors
In Volume III, the chapter beginning on p. 298 is titled,

Chapter on treatment of headaches caused by external wind which penetrated into the head The first two sections of the chapter, in order are

- on treatment of headache caused by external bad vapors which inflicted the head	 298 - On treatment of headache caused by perfume odors	298

http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/saab/avicenna/book-three.html

 * That's fine but not terribly helpful; if you wish the information to go into the article in some form please either suggest an edit or make a WP:BOLD edit yourself. Thanks --Merlinme (talk) 12:02, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Gerard of Cremona
Iranica says: "Book 1 is available in English, based on the twelfth-century Latin translation of Gerard of Cremona (with its own departures from the Arabic text) in O. C. Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine, Incorporating a Translation of the First Book, London, 1930." However this source says: "When [the fourth book, on surgery] was translated into Latin in the 13th century by Gerard of Cremona or Gerard de Sabloneta..."  I'm confused. Can anyone else shed any light? Were different books from the Canon translated into Latin at different times, by different people? --Merlinme (talk) 13:35, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Catholic Encyclopedia says: "he was able to translate not only the "Almagest", but also the entire works of Avicenna, into Latin...Whether he is the author of original treatises is uncertain. The works sometimes attributed to him are almost certainly to be ascribed to Gerard of Sabionetta, who lived in the thirteenth century." That would seem to imply to me that the translations are by Gerard of Cremona, 12th century, but the "original treatises" are probably by Gerard of Sabionetta, 13th century. --Merlinme (talk) 13:48, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Britannica also supports Gerard of Cremona translating the Canon in the 12th Century. . --Merlinme (talk) 13:50, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * User:Fiedorczuk: The sources I've listed above are not without some uncertainty, e.g. Britannica says "attributed to" Gerard of Cremona. If you can find good recent scholarship that says the translation is 13th century rather than 12th then I'd be happy to have the text changed. However I'm going to need to see a better source than an essay on www.studymode.com by "alyssame", an unidentified student with one essay credit: By no stretch of the imagination is that a WP:Reliable Source. --Merlinme (talk) 15:59, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The reference given on the Gerard of Cremona page is to Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum, p. 211, which is viewable on Amazon: . If you search for Cremona you can read p. 211 which clearly states the Canon of Medicine translation is the work of the later Gerard. As far I can tell Ostler is a reliable source, and a recent one at that. However Ostler's remark is unreferenced; given that it is more or less contradicted by other sources re: the Canon, I'd be happier if if this was supported by more than one source (or at least if it was clear what the original source is for the change in thinking from 12th to 13th century translation of the Canon).--Merlinme (talk) 16:15, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * MerlinmeThis is fine. You may wish to update the Gerard of Cremona Wikipedia page which states that “Gerard de Cremona has been mistakenly credited as the translator of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine” citing Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: a biography of Latin as the source for this statement.Fiedorczuk (talk) 16:20, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Ostler doesn't say "Gerard de Cremona has been mistakenly credited as the translator of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine", though. He says there were two men, both called Gerard of Cremona, one working in the 12th century who translated astronomy and other science, one working in the 13th century who focused on medical works. The 13th century one is "also known as Gerard de Sabloneta", but it is still correct to call him Gerard of Cremona.
 * At the moment Ostler seems to be on his own in the sources we have available in clearly stating that the Canon was translated by the 13th century Gerard. Ostler does appear to be a high quality source though. The simplest thing in the absence of other evidence is probably to make an edit reflecting the confusion, which I'll do now. --Merlinme (talk) 18:10, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on The Canon of Medicine. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20071224181856/http://www.britannica.com:80/eb/topic-92902/The-Canon-of-Medicine to http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-92902/The-Canon-of-Medicine

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 12:45, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Relationship between Sushruta Samhita and the Canon of Medicine
I would like to know the relationship between Sushruta Samhita and the Canon of Medicine. To my knowledge the medical text Sushruta Samhita was translated to Arabic in the early 8th century in Baghdad. Considering The Canon of Medicine was written in the 10th century in Baghdad, I would think there is a relationship between the two medical texts. If anyone could provide more info on how these texts relate to one another I would be most grateful. Thank you.

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on The Canon of Medicine. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20021203101003/http://www.ummah.net/history/scholars/ibn_sina/ to http://www.ummah.net/history/scholars/ibn_sina/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 19:03, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

title: Talk:The Canon of Medicine


text:
Deficit spending

Within the budgetary process, deficit spending is the amount by which spending exceeds revenue over a particular period of time, also called simply deficit, or budget deficit, the opposite of budget surplus. The term may be applied to the budget of a government, private company, or individual. A central point of controversy in economics, government deficit spending was first identified as a necessary economic tool by John Maynard Keynes in the wake of the Great Depression.

Controversy
Government deficit spending is a central point of controversy in economics, with prominent economists holding differing views.

The mainstream economics position is that deficit spending is desirable and necessary as part of countercyclical fiscal policy, but that there should not be a structural deficit (i.e., permanent deficit): The government should run deficits during recessions to compensate for the shortfall in aggregate demand, but should run surpluses in boom times so that there is no net deficit over an economic cycle (i.e., only run cyclical deficits and not structural deficits). This is derived from Keynesian economics, and gained acceptance during the period between the Great Depression in the 1930s and post-WWII in the 1950s.

This position is attacked from both sides: Advocates of federal-level fiscal conservatism argue that deficit spending is always bad policy, while some post-Keynesian economists—particularly neo-chartalists or proponents of Modern Monetary Theory—argue that deficit spending is necessary for the issuance of new money, and not only for fiscal stimulus. According to most economists, during recessions, the government can stimulate the economy by intentionally running a deficit.

The deficit spending requested by John Maynard Keynes for overcoming crises is the monetary side of his economy theory. As investment equates to real saving, money assets that build up are equivalent to debt capacity. Therefore, the excess saving of money in time of crisis should correspond to increased levels of borrowing, as this generally doesn't happen - the result is intensification of the crisis, as revenues from which money could be saved decline while a higher level of debt is needed to compensate for the collapsing revenues. The state's deficit enables a correspondent buildup of money assets for the private sector and prevents the breakdown of the economy, preventing private money savings to be run down by private debt.

The monetary mechanism describing how revenue surpluses enforce corresponding expense surpluses, and how these in turn lead to economic breakdown was explained by Wolfgang Stützel much later by the means of his Balances Mechanics.

William Vickrey, awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, identified deficits being viewed as profligate spending as his #1 fallacy of Financial Fundamentalism when he commented: ""This fallacy seems to stem from a false analogy to borrowing by individuals. Current reality is almost the exact opposite. Deficits add to the net disposable income of individuals, to the extent that government disbursements that constitute income to recipients exceed that abstracted from disposable income in taxes, fees, and other charges. This added purchasing power, when spent, provides markets for private production, inducing producers to invest in additional plant capacity, which will form part of the real heritage left to the future. This is in addition to whatever public investment takes place in infrastructure, education, research, and the like. Larger deficits, sufficient to recycle savings out of a growing gross domestic product (GDP) in excess of what can be recycled by profit-seeking private investment, are not an economic sin but an economic necessity. Deficits in excess of a gap growing as a result of the maximum feasible growth in real output might indeed cause problems, but we are nowhere near that level. Even the analogy itself is faulty. If General Motors, AT&T, and individual households had been required to balance their budgets in the manner being applied to the Federal government, there would be no corporate bonds, no mortgages, no bank loans, and many fewer automobiles, telephones, and houses.""

Fiscal conservatism
Advocates of fiscal conservatism reject Keynesianism by arguing that government should always run a balanced budget (and a surplus to pay down any outstanding debt), and that deficit spending is always bad policy. The neoclassical-inclined Chicago school of economics has supported fiscal conservative ideas. Numerous states of the United States have a balanced budget amendment to their state constitution, and the Stability and Growth Pact of the European Monetary Union punishes government deficits of 3% of GDP or greater.

Proponents of fiscal conservatism date back to Adam Smith, founder of modern economics. Fiscal conservatism was the dominant position until the Great Depression, associated with the gold standard and expressed in the now outdated Treasury View that government fiscal policy is ineffective.

The usual argument against deficit spending is the Government-Household analogy: households should not run deficits—one should have money before one spends it, from prudence—and that what is correct for a household is correct for a nation and its government. A similar argument is that deficit spending today will require increased taxation in the future, thus burdening future generations. (See generational accounting for discussion.)

Others argue that because debt is both owed by and owed to private individuals, there is no net debt burden of government debt, just wealth transfer (redistribution) from those who owe debt (government, backed by tax payers) to those who hold debt (holders of government bonds).

A related line of argument, associated with the Austrian school of economics, is that government deficits are inflationary. Anything other than mild or moderate inflation is generally accepted in economics to be a bad thing. In practice this is argued to be because governments pay off debts by printing money, increasing the money supply and creating inflation, and is taken further by some as an argument against fiat money and in favor of hard money, especially the gold standard.

Post-Keynesian economics
Some Post-Keynesian economists argue that deficit spending is necessary, either to create the money supply (Chartalism) or to satisfy demand for savings in excess of what can be satisfied by private investment.

Chartalists argue that deficit spending is logically necessary because, in their view, fiat money is created by deficit spending: fiat money cannot be collected in taxes before it is issued and spent; the amount of fiat money in circulation is exactly the government debt—money spent but not collected in taxes. In a quip, "fiat money governments are 'spend and tax', not 'tax and spend'"—deficit spending comes first.

Chartalists argue that nations are fundamentally different from households. Governments in a fiat money system which only have debt in their own currency can issue other liabilities, their fiat money, to pay off their interest bearing bond debt. They cannot go bankrupt involuntarily because this fiat money is what is used in their economy to settle debts, while household liabilities are not so used. This view is summarized as: "But it is hard to understand how the concept of "budget busting" applies to a government which, as a sovereign issuer of its own currency, can always create dollars to spend. There is, in other words, no budget to "bust". A national "budget" is merely an account of national spending priorities, and does not represent an external constraint in the manner of a household budget."

Continuing in this vein, Chartalists argue that a structural deficit is necessary for monetary expansion in an expanding economy: if the economy grows, the money supply should as well, which should be accomplished by government deficit spending. Private sector savings are equal to government sector deficits, to the penny. In the absence of sufficient deficit spending, money supply can increase by increasing financial leverage in the economy—the amount of bank money grows, while the base money supply remains unchanged or grows at a slower rate, and thus the ratio (leverage = credit/base) increases—which can lead to a credit bubble and a financial crisis.

Chartalism is a small minority view in economics; while it has had advocates over the years, and influenced Keynes, who specifically credited it, A notable proponent was Ukrainian-American economist Abba P. Lerner, who founded the school of Neo-Chartalism, and advocated deficit spending in his theory of functional finance. A contemporary center of Neo-Chartalism is the Kansas City School of economics.

Chartalists, like other Keynesians, accept the paradox of thrift, which argues that identifying behavior of individual households and the nation as a whole commits the fallacy of composition; while the paradox of thrift (and thus deficit spending for fiscal stimulus) is widely accepted in economics, the Chartalist form is not.

An alternative argument for the necessity of deficits was given by U.S. economist William Vickrey, who argued that deficits were necessary to satisfy demand for savings in excess of what can be satisfied by private investment. "Larger deficits, sufficient to recycle savings out of a growing gross domestic product (GDP) in excess of what can be recycled by profit-seeking private investment, are not an economic sin but an economic necessity."

Government deficits
When the outlay of a government (i.e., the total of its purchases of goods and services, transfers in grants to individuals and corporations, and its net interest payments) exceeds its tax revenues, the government budget is said to be in deficit; government spending in excess of tax receipts is known as deficit spending. For a government that uses accrual accounting (rather than cash accounting) the budget balance is calculated using only spending on current operations, with expenditure on new capital assets excluded.

Governments usually issue bonds to match their deficits. They can be bought by its Central Bank through open market operations. Otherwise the debt issuance can increase the level of (i) public debt, (ii) private sector net worth, (iii) debt service (interest payments), and (iv) interest rates. (See Crowding out below.) Deficit spending may, however, be consistent with public debt remaining stable as a proportion of GDP, depending on the level of GDP growth.

The opposite of a budget deficit is a budget surplus; in this case, tax revenues exceed government purchases and transfer payments. For the public sector to be in deficit implies that the private sector (domestic and foreign) is in surplus. An increase in public indebtedness must necessarily therefore correspond to an equal decrease in private sector net indebtedness. In other words, deficit spending permits the private sector to accumulate net worth.

On average, through the economic cycle, most governments have tended to run budget deficits, as can be seen from the large debt balances accumulated by governments across the world.

Keynesian effect
Following John Maynard Keynes, many economists recommend deficit spending to moderate or end a recession, especially a severe one. When the economy has high unemployment, an increase in government purchases creates a market for business output, creating income and encouraging increases in consumer spending, which creates further increases in the demand for business output. (This is the multiplier effect.) This raises the real gross domestic product (GDP) and the employment of labour, and if all else is constant, lowers the unemployment rate. (The connection between demand for GDP and unemployment is called Okun's law.)

The increased size of the market, due to government deficits, can further stimulate the economy by raising business profitability and spurring optimism, which encourages private fixed investment in factories, machines, and the like to rise. This accelerator effect stimulates demand further and encourages rising employment.

Similarly, running a government surplus or reducing its deficit reduces consumer and business spending and raises unemployment. This can lower the inflation rate. Any use of the government deficit to steer the macro-economy is called fiscal policy.

A deficit does not simply stimulate demand. If private investment is stimulated, that increases the ability of the economy to supply output in the long run. Also, if the government's deficit is spent on such things as infrastructure, basic research, public health, and education, that can also increase potential output in the long run. Finally, the high demand that a government deficit provides may actually allow greater growth of potential supply, following Verdoorn's law.

Deficit spending may create inflation, or encourage existing inflation to persist. For example, in the United States Vietnam-war era deficits encouraged inflation. This is especially true at low unemployment rates. But government deficits are not the only cause of inflation: It can arise due to such supply-side shocks as the oil crises of the 1970s and inflation left over from the past (e.g., inflationary expectations and the price/wage spiral).

If equilibrium is located on the classical range of the supply graph, an increase in government spending will lead to inflation without affecting unemployment. There must also be enough money circulating in the system to allow inflation to persist, so that inflation depends on monetary policy.

Loanable funds
Many economists believe government deficits influence the economy through the loanable funds market, whose existence Chartalists and other Post-Keynesians dispute. Government borrowing in this market increases the demand for loanable funds and thus (ignoring other changes) pushes up interest rates. Rising interest rates can crowd out, or discourage, fixed private investment spending, canceling out some or even all of the demand stimulus arising from the deficit—and perhaps hurting long-term supply-side growth.

Increased deficits also raise the amount of total income received, which raises the amount of saving done by individuals and corporations and thus the supply of loanable funds, lowering interest rates. Thus, crowding out is a problem only when the economy is already close to full employment (say, at about 4% unemployment) and the scope for increasing income and saving is blocked by resource constraints (potential output).

Despite a government debt that exceeded GDP in 1945, the U.S. saw the long prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. The growth of the supply side, it seems, was not hurt by the large deficits and debts.

A government deficit increases government debt. In many countries the government borrows by selling bonds rather than borrowing from banks. The most important burden of this debt is the interest that must be paid to bond-holders, which restricts a government's ability to raise its outlays or cut taxes to attain other goals.

Crowding out
Usually when economists use the term "crowding out" they are referring to the government spending using up financial and other resources that would otherwise be used by private enterprise. However, some commentators use "crowding out" to refer to government providing a service or good that would otherwise be a business opportunity for private industry.

Unintentional deficits
National government deficits may be intentional, a result of policy decisions, or unintentional. When an economy goes into a recession, deficits usually rise in the more affluent countries. Revenue from progressive taxes based on economic activity (income, expenditure, or transactions) falls. Other sources of tax revenue such as wealth taxes, notably property taxes, are not subject to recessions, though they are subject to asset price bubbles. Transfer payments due to increased unemployment and reduced household income rise.

Automatic vs. active deficit policies
Most economists favor the use of automatic stabilization over active or discretionary use of deficits to fight mild recessions (or surpluses to combat inflation). Active policy-making takes too long for politicians to institute and too long to affect the economy. Often, the medicine ends up affecting the economy only after its disease has been cured, leaving the economy with side-effects such as inflation. For example, President John F. Kennedy proposed tax cuts in response to the high unemployment of 1960, but these were instituted only in 1964 and impacted the economy only in 1965 or 1966 and the increased debt encouraged inflation, reinforcing the effect of Vietnam war deficit spending.

Structural and cyclical deficit
Structural and cyclical deficits are two components of deficit spending. These terms are especially applied to public sector spending which contributes to the budget balance of the overall economy of a country. The total budget deficit, or headline deficit, is equal to the sum of the structural deficit and the cyclical deficit (or surplus/es).

Cyclical deficit
A cyclical (temporary) deficit is a deficit that is related to the business or economic cycle. The business cycle is the period of time it takes for an economy to move from expansion to contraction, until it begins to expand again. This cycle can last anywhere from several months to many years, and does not follow a predictable pattern.

The cyclical deficit is the deficit experienced at the low point of this cycle when there are lower levels of business activity and higher levels of unemployment. This leads to lower government revenues from taxation and higher government expenditure on things like social security, which may cause the economy to go into deficit. While the cyclical component is affected by government decisions, it is mainly influenced by national and international economic conditions which can be significantly beyond government control.

Structural deficit
A structural (permanent) deficit differs from a cyclical deficit in that it exists regardless of the point in the business cycle due to an underlying imbalance in government revenues and expenditures. Thus, even at the high point of the business cycle when revenues are high the country's economy may still be in deficit.

The structural component of the budget is used by some economists as an indication of a government's financial management, as it indicates the underlying balance between long-term government revenues and expenditure, while removing factors that are mainly attributable to the business cycle. Other economists see the structural deficit as simply a reflection of the implied discretionary fiscal stance of the government, that is, a structural deficit would be an expansionary fiscal stance that promotes at least nominal economic growth.

Where deficits are being funded by borrowing, a structural deficit is seen by some economists as an issue for a government as even at the high points of the business cycle the government may need to continue to borrow and thus continue to accumulate debt. According to them, this would lead to continued "deterioration" of the debt-to-GDP ratio, a basic measure of the health of an economy and an indication of the country's ability to pay off its debts.

Other economists believe that provided the debt is issued in the country's own currency, and provided that currency 'floats' freely against other currencies, and provided the overall level of the deficit is not so large as to cause excessive inflation, then structural deficits are harmless. Those economists who believe that structural deficits need to be reduced argue that structural deficit issues can only be addressed by explicit and direct government policies, primarily involving reducing government spending or increasing taxation.

An alternative in countries which have fiat money is to address high levels of debt and a poor debt-to-GDP ratio by monetising the debt, essentially creating more money to be used to pay off the debt. Monetising the debt can lead to high levels of inflation, but with proper fiscal control this can be minimised or even avoided. Both it and the final option of defaulting on the debt are thought to be poor results for investors. There having been recent incidents involving quantitative easing in the UK, the U.S. and the Eurozone following the 2008 global financial crisis. These are the first instances of either since the dropping of the gold standard.

Structural deficits may be planned, or may be unintentional due to poor economic management or a fundamental lack of economic capacity in a country. In a planned structural deficit, the government may commit to spending money on the future of the country in order to improve the productive potential of the economy, for example investing in infrastructure, education, or transport, with the intention that this investment will yield long-term economic gains. If these investments work out as planned the structural deficit will be dealt with over the long-term due to the returns on investment. However, if expenditures continue to exceed revenues, the structural deficit will worsen.

A government may also knowingly plan the budget to be in deficit in order to sustain the country's standard of living and continue its obligations to the citizens, although this would generally be an indication of poor economic management. Ongoing planned structural deficits may eventually lead to a crisis of confidence in investors regarding the country's ability to pay the debt, as seen in the financial crises in a number of European countries since the late-2000s, especially the Greek and Spanish financial crises.

Structural and cyclical surplus
Structural and cyclical surpluses are the opposite of the deficits described above. With a cyclical surplus, at the high point of the business cycle government revenue will be expected to be higher and government expenditure lower, meaning revenue exceeds expenditure and the government experiences a surplus. Likewise, a structural surplus is when the government budget is fundamentally operating at a surplus regardless of its point in the business cycle.

Interplay of structural and cyclical components
The overall government budget balance is determined by the sum of the cyclical deficit or surplus and the structural deficit or surplus (refer to chart). Therefore, for example, a cyclical surplus could mask an underlying structural deficit, as the overall budget may appear to be in surplus if the cyclical surplus is greater than the structural deficit. In this case, as economic conditions deteriorated and the budget went into cyclical deficit, the structural and cyclical deficits would then compound leading to higher deficits and more dire economic conditions.

An example of this occurred in Australia during the later years of the Howard government. From 2009 Treasury attempted to separate cyclical and structural components of the budget balance, and first started publishing estimates of the structural component. Treasury showed that despite a run of large and often unexpected headline surpluses, the Australian economy was in fact in structural deficit from at least 2006–2007, and was deteriorating as far back as 2002–2003. At this time they determined that despite a headline surplus of A$17.2 billion in 2006–2007, there was an underlying structural deficit of around $3 billion, or 0.3% of GDP.

This structural deficit was caused by a mining boom leading to extremely high revenues and large surpluses for several consecutive years, which the Howard government then used to fuel spending and tax cuts, rather than saving or investing them to cover future cyclical downturns. With the Global Financial Crisis unexpectedly starting in 2007, revenues quickly and significantly declined and the underlying structural deficit was exposed and exacerbated, which then had to be dealt with by later governments. By 2008–2009 when the budget had a headline deficit of $32 billion, the structural deficit was out to around $50 billion. In 2013 it was estimated the structural deficit remained at about $40 billion, or 2.5% of GDP.

Criticism
Economist Chris Dillow has questioned the distinction between cyclical and structural deficits, and this has received support from other leading economists. He contends that there are too many variables involved to allow a clear distinction to be made, especially when dealing with current circumstances rather than retrospectively, and suggests that the concept of structural deficits may be used more for political purposes than analytical purposes. The piece largely centred on the UK Labour government 1997–2010 of which Chris Dillow was a strong supporter and criticism that they ran a large structural deficit. Economic representatives of that government acknowledge that, unbeknownst to them at the time, they were running a structural deficit. Economist and Professor Bill Mitchell has also questioned the misuse of the term 'structural deficit', particularly in the Australian context.

Martin Wolf argues that nobody knows what the structural or cyclically adjusted balance is, and that it is least knowable precisely when such knowledge is most essential, namely, when the economy is experiencing a boom. He provides two examples of widely divergent IMF estimates of the average structural fiscal balance of Ireland and Spain for the period 2000–2007. The estimates were made in 2008 and in 2012 and Wolf stresses that they were post-fact estimates and not predictions. Specifically, the IMF declared in 2008 that Ireland had run an average structural surplus of 1.3% of GDP per year between 2000 and 2007, and Spain had an average structural surplus of 0.5% of GDP per year over the same period. Four years later, the IMF decided that, for this same 8-year period, Ireland's annual average structural balance was four percentage points worse than it had thought in April 2008, estimating that Ireland had been running an average structural fiscal deficit of 2.7% of GDP. For Spain, the 2012 IMF estimate differed by 1.7 percentage points, estimating this time that Spain had been running and average structural fiscal deficit of 1.2% of GDP in the years 2000–2007.

Bruce Yandle writing for Reason, stated in 2022 as a result of rising inflation that, "[It would be prudent to] Blame Washington, Not Moscow, for Surging Inflation; Few politicians are willing to admit deficit spending is the larger cause."

title: Deficit spending