section_path: Science and medicine
section_name: Science and medicine
paragraph_text: Science and medicine
  
  Byzantine science played an important and crucial role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and to Renaissance Italy. Many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high offices in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
  
  The writings of classical antiquity were cultivated and preserved in Byzantium. Therefore, Byzantine science was in every period closely connected with ancient philosophy and metaphysics. In the field of engineering, Isidore of Miletus, the Greek mathematician and architect of the Hagia Sophia, produced the first compilation of Archimedes ' works c. 530, and it is through this manuscript tradition, kept alive by the school of mathematics and engineering founded c. 850 during the "Byzantine Renaissance" by Leo the Mathematician, that such works are known today, primarily through the school's production, the Archimedes Palimpsest.
  
  Alexandrian philosopher John Philoponus was the first to question Aristotelian physics. Unlike Aristotle, who based his physics on verbal arguments, Philoponus relied on observations. Philoponus' criticism of the Aristotelian principles of physics was an inspiration for Galileo Galilei 's refutation of Aristotelian physics during the Scientific Revolution many centuries later, as Galileo cites Philoponus substantially in his works.
  
  The Byzantines pioneered the concept of the hospital as an institution offering medical care and the possibility of a cure for the patients, as a reflection of the ideals of Christian charity, rather than merely being a place to die.
  
  Greek fire, an incendiary weapon which could even burn on water, is attributed to the Byzantines. It played a crucial role in the empire's victory over the Umayyad Caliphate during the siege of Constantinople (717–718). The discovery is attributed to Callinicus of Heliopolis from Syria who fled during the Arab conquest of Syria. However, it has also been argued that no single person invented Greek fire, but rather, that it was "invented by the chemists in Constantinople who had inherited the discoveries of the Alexandrian chemical school...".
  
  In the final century of the empire, astronomy and other mathematical sciences were taught in Trebizond; medicine attracted the interest of almost all scholars. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 fuelled the era later commonly known as the " Italian Renaissance ". During this period, refugee Byzantine scholars were principally responsible for carrying, in person and writing, ancient Greek grammatical, literary, mathematical, and astronomical knowledge to early Renaissance Italy. They also brought with them classical learning and texts on botany, medicine and zoology, as well as the works of Dioscorides and John Philoponus' criticism of Aristotelian physics.