Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe was an irreversible break with the natural philosophy that had preceded it, fundamentally changing how the natural world was investigated and understood. The New Science that emerged departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions, was more mechanistic in its worldview and more integrated with mathematics, and was focused on the acquisition and interpretation of new evidence.
The Scientific Revolution is a convenient boundary between ancient thought and modern science. While the period is frequently said to have begun in 1543 with the printings of De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius and De Revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus, the SN 1572 supernova has also been suggested as its beginning. The period culminated with the publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton.
Introduction
Great advances in science have been termed "revolutions" since the 18th century. For example, in 1747, the French mathematician Alexis Clairaut wrote that "Newton was said in his own life to have created a revolution". The word was also used in the preface to Antoine Lavoisier's 1789 work announcing the discovery of oxygen. "Few revolutions in science have immediately excited so much general notice as the introduction of the theory of oxygen... Lavoisier saw his theory accepted by all the most eminent men of his time, and established over a great part of Europe within a few years from its first promulgation."In the 19th century, William Whewell described the revolution in science itself – the scientific method – that had taken place in the 15th–16th century. "Among the most conspicuous of the revolutions which opinions on this subject have undergone, is the transition from an implicit trust in the internal powers of man's mind to a professed dependence upon external observation; and from an unbounded reverence for the wisdom of the past, to a fervid expectation of change and improvement." This gave rise to the common view of the Scientific Revolution today:
File:Galileo Galilei by Ottavio Leoni Marucelliana.jpg|thumb|left|Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Ottavio Leoni
While the Scientific Revolution is frequently said to have begun in 1543 with the printings of De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius and De Revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus and to be complete in the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia, at least one historian has proposed 1572, when Tycho Brahe observed the SN 1572 supernova, as an alternative starting date. Much of the change of attitude came from Galileo Galilei whose telescopic observations provided persuasive evidence for heliocentrism and who developed the science of motion and Francis Bacon, whose "confident and emphatic announcement" in the modern progress of science inspired the creation of scientific societies such as the Royal Society.
In the 20th century, Alexandre Koyré introduced the term "scientific revolution", centering his analysis on Galileo. The term was popularized by Herbert Butterfield in his Origins of Modern Science. Thomas Kuhn's 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions emphasizes that different theoretical frameworks—such as Einstein's theory of relativity and Newton's theory of gravity, which it replaced—cannot be directly compared without meaning loss.
Significance
The period saw a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas across mathematics, physics, astronomy, and biology in institutions supporting scientific investigation and in the more widely held picture of the universe. The Scientific Revolution led to the establishment of several modern sciences. In 1984, Joseph Ben-David wrote:Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim that there was a revolutionary change in world view. In 1611 English poet John Donne wrote:
Butterfield was less disconcerted but nevertheless saw the change as fundamental:
David Wootton calls the Scientific Revolution "the most important transformation in human history" since the Neolithic Revolution. There continues to be scholarly engagement regarding the boundaries of the Scientific Revolution and its chronology. The subsequent Age of Enlightenment saw the concept of a scientific revolution emerge in the 18th-century work of Jean Sylvain Bailly, who described a two-stage process of sweeping away the old and establishing the new.
Ancient, medieval and Renaissance background
The Scientific Revolution was built upon the foundation of ancient Greek learning and science in the Middle Ages, as it had been elaborated and further developed by Roman/Byzantine science and medieval Islamic science. The "Aristotelian tradition" was still an important intellectual framework in the 17th century, although by that time natural philosophers had moved away from much of it. Key scientific ideas dating back to classical antiquity had changed drastically over the years and in many cases had been discredited. The ideas that remained, which were transformed fundamentally during the Scientific Revolution, include:- Aristotle's cosmology that placed the Earth at the center of a spherical hierarchic cosmos. The terrestrial and celestial regions were made up of different elements which had different kinds of natural movement.
- * The terrestrial region, according to Aristotle, consisted of concentric spheres of the four classical elements—earth, water, air, and fire. All bodies naturally moved in straight lines until they reached the sphere appropriate to their elemental composition—their natural place. All other terrestrial motions were non-natural, or violent.
- * The celestial region was made up of the fifth element, aether, which was unchanging and moved naturally with uniform circular motion. In the Aristotelian tradition, astronomical theories sought to explain the observed irregular motion of celestial objects through the combined effects of multiple uniform circular motions.
- The Ptolemaic model of planetary motion: based on the geometrical model of Eudoxus of Cnidus, Ptolemy's Almagest, demonstrated that calculations could compute the exact positions of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets in the future and in the past, and showed how these computational models were derived from astronomical observations. As such they formed the model for later astronomical developments. The physical basis for Ptolemaic models invoked layers of spherical shells, though the most complex models were inconsistent with this physical explanation.
The Scientific Revolution was enabled by advances in book production. Before the advent of the printing press, introduced in Europe in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, there was no mass market on the continent for scientific treatises, as there had been for religious books. Printing decisively changed the way scientific knowledge was created, as well as how it was disseminated. It enabled accurate diagrams, maps, anatomical drawings, and representations of flora and fauna to be reproduced, and printing made scholarly books more widely accessible, allowing researchers to consult ancient texts freely and to compare their own observations with those of fellow scholars. Although printers' blunders still often resulted in the spread of false data, the development of engraved metal plates allowed accurate visual information to be made permanent, a change from previously, when woodcut illustrations deteriorated through repetitive use. The ability to access previous scientific research meant that researchers did not have to always start from scratch in making sense of their own observational data.
It is also true that many of the important figures of the Scientific Revolution shared in the general Renaissance respect for ancient learning and cited ancient pedigrees for their innovations. Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler and Newton all traced different ancient and medieval ancestries for the heliocentric system. In the Axioms Scholium of his Principia, Newton said its axiomatic three laws of motion were already accepted by mathematicians such as Christiaan Huygens, Wallace, Wren and others. While preparing a revised edition of his Principia, Newton attributed his law of gravity and his first law of motion to a range of historical figures.
Some scholars have noted a direct tie between "particular aspects of traditional Christianity" and the rise of science. For example, historian Peter Harrison argues that Christianity contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution:
In The Origins of Modern Science, Herbert Butterfield observed that "the Christians helped the cause of modern rationalism by their jealous determination to sweep out of the world all miracles and magic except their own." Kepler perhaps took this logic to its furthest extreme with a religious zeal for mathematical order and a universe so autonomous that it effectively barred God from any further interference in His own handiwork.
Scientific method
Under the scientific method as conceived in the 17th century, natural and artificial circumstances were set aside as a research tradition of systematic experimentation was slowly accepted by the scientific community. The philosophy of using an inductive and mathematical approach to obtain knowledge—to abandon assumption and to attempt to observe with an open mind was championed by René Descartes, Galileo, and Bacon—in contrast with the earlier, Aristotelian approach of deduction, by which analysis of known facts produced further understanding. In practice, many scientists and philosophers believed that a healthy mix of both was needed—the willingness to question assumptions, yet also to interpret observations assumed to have some degree of validity.By the end of the Scientific Revolution, the qualitative world of book-reading philosophers had been changed into a mechanical, mathematical world to be known through experimental research. Though it is certainly not true that Newtonian science was like modern science in all respects, it conceptually resembled ours in many ways. Many of the hallmarks of modern science, especially with regard to its institutionalization and professionalization, did not become standard until the mid-19th century.