He sees specific influences in Alhazen's physical optical theory, Chinese mechanical technologies leading to the perception of the world as a machine, the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, which carried implicitly a new mode of mathematical atomic thinking, and the heliocentrism rooted in in ancient Egyptian religious ideas associated with Hermeticism.
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He claims that the Renaissance was in fact a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages, and that the twelfth century was the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance".
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(A standard history of mathematics, according to Franklin (E. T. Bell's The Development of Mathematics, 1940), says that "Leonardo's published jottings on mathematics are trivial, even puerile, and show no mathematical talent whatever.") The invention of printing he compares to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".
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