Scientific Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1611, the English poet John Donne wrote that "The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it." Donne was describing the Scientific Revolution, the upheaval in 16th and 17th century Europe that historians treat as the boundary between ancient thought and modern science. He felt the ground shifting beneath every certainty he had inherited. For almost five millennia, the Earth had sat motionless at the center of the universe, ringed by perfect, unchanging heavens. Then, within a few generations, that picture came apart. What forces could dismantle a worldview that had stood for thousands of years? Why did this rapid accumulation of knowledge erupt in a small corner of Western Europe and nowhere else? And how did a culture of book-reading philosophers become a culture of people who measured, tested, and counted? The historian David Wootton calls this the most important transformation in human history since the Neolithic Revolution. Herbert Butterfield went further, claiming it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity" in European history.

• 2. Naming The Rupture

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  Alexis Clairaut, the French mathematician, applied the word "revolution" to Isaac Newton in 1747, an early sign that people already sensed they had lived through an upheaval. The word itself had been used to describe scientific change since at least the 18th century. In the following century, William Whewell chose it to mark a shift away from trust in the internal powers of the mind toward a dependence on external observation, and away from reverence for the past toward an expectation of change and improvement. Alexandre Koyré, writing in the 20th century, called the same event a "mutation" in human intellect. The historian and philosopher Herbert Butterfield gave the term its popular currency in his Origins of Modern Science, treating the period as synonymous with the emergence of modern science. Not every scholar accepts the drama in that vocabulary. Champions of a continuity thesis, including Pierre Duhem, John Hermann Randall, Alistair Crombie, and William A. Wallace, argue that the scientific "revolution" is a myth. That argument turns on a question of dates, and the dates themselves are contested.

• 3. Where It Begins

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  1543 is the year most often given for the start, the year that saw the printing of De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius and De Revolutionibus by Nicolaus Copernicus. Both titles arrived together, one mapping the human body and the other the heavens. Yet at least one historian proposes a different opening, the moment in 1572 when Tycho Brahe observed a new star, the supernova now called SN 1572, in a sky that was supposed to be unchangeable. The closing date draws more agreement. The period culminated in 1687 with Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, often described as a grand synthesis. Between those bookends sits a transformation that the historian Joseph Ben-David, writing in 1984, described as unprecedented. Rapid accumulation of knowledge had never occurred before the 17th century, he noted, and the new kind of scientific activity stayed restricted to a few countries of Western Europe for about two hundred years. Only since the 19th century has that knowledge spread to the rest of the world.

• 4. Standing On Older Shoulders

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  Latin was the common language of the scholars who carried out the Scientific Revolution, and that detail points back to its foundation. According to historians Thomas Kuhn and Edward Grant, the revolution was built on translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin, beginning in the 10th century and accelerating through the 12th and 13th. Ancient Greek learning, Roman and Byzantine science, and medieval Islamic science all flowed into Europe alongside the new medieval university. Grant calls this the greatest intellectual expropriation of knowledge in human history. Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Newton all studied at universities founded during the High Middle Ages, and all acknowledged debts to earlier scholars. The framework they would break with belonged to Aristotle, whose universe was geocentric and hierarchical. An imperfect terrestrial region of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, each seeking its natural place, lay surrounded by an unchanging celestial realm of nested spheres made from a fifth element, aether. Some scholars trace the revolution's roots elsewhere entirely. Arun Bala suggests the changes were shaped by Arabic optics, Indian mathematics, and Chinese mechanical technologies, which Europeans synthesized into a new framework.

• 5. A Faith In Order

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  Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, argued that modern science inherited from medieval scholastics a "faith" in the power of human reason. The relationship between the new science and Christianity ran deeper than mere coincidence of timing. Historian Peter Harrison argues that many key figures held deep religious convictions and believed themselves champions of a science more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas they replaced. Butterfield observed that Christians helped the cause of modern rationalism through their determination to sweep miracles and magic out of the world, except their own. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all sincerely believed the order and perfection of the universe reflected the perfection of its Creator. Far from seeing their work as irreligious, they treated the uncovering of hidden mathematical perfection as an act of devout worship. That conviction sat alongside a wave of new technology that would soon give them the instruments to look closer.

• 6. Glass, Ink, And New Worlds

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  In 1268, Roger Bacon recorded the earliest known comment on the use of glass for optical purposes. The first eyeglasses followed by about 1290, made in central Italy, most likely in Pisa or Florence, and Venice became an important center of manufacture by 1300. By the mid-15th century Venetian glassmakers had developed cristallo, an exceptionally clear colourless glass made from high-purity quartz pebbles and using manganese oxide as a decolorizer. When the first telescope appeared, its earliest historical record came not from a work of natural philosophy but from a patent filed by a spectacle maker. Johannes Gutenberg introduced the movable type printing press to Europe in the 1440s, and the consequences for science were vast. Before printing there had been no mass market on the continent for scientific treatises, only for religious books. Scholars in different countries could now study the same diagrams and read the same texts, comparing their observations against those of distant colleagues. Errors still spread, as when Galileo's lunar images in the 1610 Sidereus Nuncius appeared back to front, yet engraved metal plates made accurate visual information permanent. Amerigo Vespucci, returning from Brazil in the spring of 1503, used his Mundus Novus letter to argue in print that the western lands were a new continent, not the edge of Asia. Since the Americas were absent from Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia, the basis for most maps of the era, their discovery called Ptolemy's reliability into doubt, including his astronomy.

• 7. The Sun At The Center

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  Copernicus' 1543 work tried to demonstrate that the Sun, not the Earth, sat at the center of the universe. Few were troubled at first, and the pope and several archbishops wanted more detail, while his model was later used to create the calendar of Pope Gregory XIII. Still, most of his contemporaries doubted that the Earth moved, because no stellar parallax could be observed and because the idea contradicted the authority of Aristotle. Kepler gave the theory new force. Using the accurate observations of Tycho Brahe, he proposed in works including the Astronomia nova that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses, and treated them as free floating bodies rather than objects fixed to rotating spheres. His Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae would later influence Newton's theory of universal gravitation. Galileo, meanwhile, turned a telescope on the sky in 1609 and found the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, spots on the Sun, and mountains on the Moon. Using an early theory of inertia, he explained why a rock dropped from a tower falls straight down even on a spinning Earth. The final argument came from Newton's Principia, which derived Kepler's laws from a mathematical description of gravity and used the same principles to account for comets, the tides, and the precession of the equinoxes. He predicted that the Earth should be an oblate spheroid, a claim later vindicated by other scientists.

• 8. The New Method

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  Francis Bacon has been called the father of empiricism, and his Novum Organum of 1620 laid out a new logic he believed superior to the old syllogism. Man, he wrote, is "the minister and interpreter of nature," and "knowledge and human power are synonymous," yet "nature can only be commanded by obeying her." He called his planned reformation of all knowledge the Instauratio Magna, the Great Instauration, and hoped it would relieve mankind's miseries through a progeny of inventions. Notably, he rejected several correct theories, including William Gilbert's magnetism, Copernicus's heliocentrism, and Kepler's laws. Gilbert, whose De Magnete appeared in 1600, advocated the experimental method even before Bacon described it, building a model Earth called the terrella and concluding from it that the Earth itself is magnetic. Galileo declared in The Assayer that the universe is written in the language of mathematics, in triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. To make measurements comparable across days and laboratories, he set up standards of length and time. The mathematization deepened as François Viète published the first symbolic notation for parameters in algebra in 1591, René Descartes improved algebra in La Géométrie in 1637, and Newton developed infinitesimal calculus. John Locke gave empiricism an influential formulation in his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing the mind begins as a tabula rasa, a blank tablet.