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| - Scientific activities were carried on throughout the Middle Ages in areas as diverse as astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. Whereas the ancient cultures of the world (i.e. those prior to the fall of Rome and the dawn of Islam) had developed many of the foundations of science, it was during the Middle Ages that the scientific method was born and science became a formal discipline separate from philosophy. There were scientific discoveries throughout the world, as in the Islamic world, in the Mediterranean basin, China, and India, while from the 12th century onwards, the scientific development in Western Europe began to catch up again.
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abstract
| - Scientific activities were carried on throughout the Middle Ages in areas as diverse as astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. Whereas the ancient cultures of the world (i.e. those prior to the fall of Rome and the dawn of Islam) had developed many of the foundations of science, it was during the Middle Ages that the scientific method was born and science became a formal discipline separate from philosophy. There were scientific discoveries throughout the world, as in the Islamic world, in the Mediterranean basin, China, and India, while from the 12th century onwards, the scientific development in Western Europe began to catch up again. The Byzantine Empire, which was the most sophisticated Mediterranean culture at the start of the early Middle Ages, preserved the systems and theories of science, mathematics and medicine of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The works of Aristotle, Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, Euclid and others spread through the empire. Meanwhile, Western Europe had suffered a catastrophic loss of knowledge following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Islamic world soon became the center of scientific activity, making major advances in many fields, most notably the development of the scientific method by Muslim scientists such as Alhazen, Biruni, and Avicenna. Thanks to the Church scholars such as Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Buridan, the West adopted this spirit of scientific inquiry, which would later lead to Europe's taking the lead in science during the European Scientific Revolution using translations of medieval works.
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