The Invention Of The Scientific Revolution

During the seventeenth century, the scientific revolution in Europe was at its peak, changing people’s lives through the new techniques of the scientific method. Citizens of western civilizations had previously used religion as the lens through which they perceived their beliefs and customs in their communities. Before the scientific revolution, science and religion were intertwined, and people were taught to accept religious laws and doctrines without questioning; the Church was the ultimate authority on how the world worked. However, during this revolution, scientists were inspired to learn and understand the laws of the universe had created, a noble and controversial move toward truth seeking. The famous scientists of the time, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, were known to be natural philosophers, intending to reveal God’s mystery and understand (through proof) the majesty of God. Throughout previous centuries, people had hypothesized how the world and natural phenomenon may work, and new Protestant ideals demanded constant interrogation and examination. Nevertheless, some of these revelations went against the Church’s teachings and authority. If people believed the Church could be wrong, then they could question everything around them, as well. As a result, the introduction of the scientific method, a process by which scientists discovered and proved new theories, was revolutionary because it distinguished what could be proved as real from what was simply

Lisa Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution provides a comprehensive breakdown of the discoveries that defined the Scientific Revolution and the history behind them. The story of the scientific revolution truly begins with a separation between the Catholic Church and the denizens of Europe brought on by the Protestant Reformation. This separation led directly to the questioning of the church and what they deemed to be true. The growing suspicion of the church applied not only to the politics and religious views but the scientific “facts” the church was built upon. The suspicion of these scientific facts quickly grew to an open challenging of these facts, The Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution is something we have all studied in our grade school years and the discoveries of people such as Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei are well documented and arguably common knowledge but Jardine’s book Ingenious Pursuits encapsulates the scientific revolution in a new light. Jardine accomplishes this by telling the stories of some of the greatest achievements of the Scientific Revolution. These stories reveal the collaborations of some of histories most brilliant minds as well as the secrecy amongst them and uncover the motives that fueled many of these accomplishments.

In the beginning God created the heavens with the Earth along with man in his own image. For over 1500 years, Christian followers were heavy believers of the bible, seeing it as the primary source for knowledge. Then came the scientific revolution in the 1500s, a movement which challenged the Christian view of the universe. It was a time when people were looking for a new way of thinking about the world. Since then and to this day, there has been several instances in which scientific inquiry and religious belief have collided in their ideologies.

In the book “ The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction”, Lawrence Principe discusses the general occurring events of the scientific revolution, and overviews various in-depth details in relation to those events. People at the time highly focused on the meanings and causes of their surrounds, as their motive was to “control, improve and exploit” (Principe 2) the world. In his work, Principe has successfully supported the notion that the Scientific Revolution stood as a period in time where one's innovation would drive improvements towards change and continuity of future innovations, along with changes of tradition. His statement is strongly backed by his detailed and particular order of events throughout the book. Nevertheless, certain details that lead beyond the necessary background are found, as they do not appertain to the general line of the book, but rather for background knowledge.

Over the course of the years, society has been reformed by new ideas of science. We learn more and more about global warming, outer space, and technology. However, this pattern of gaining knowledge did not pick up significantly until the Scientific Revolution. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Scientific Revolution started, which concerned the fields of astronomy, mechanics, and medicine. These new scientists used math and observations strongly contradicting religious thought at the time, which was dependent on the Aristotelian-Ptolemy theory. However, astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton accepted the heliocentric theory. Astronomical findings of the Scientific Revolution disproved the fact that humans were

Another important figure in the Scientific Revolution was Galileo Galilei. He was an Italian born professor of mathematics who had a great interest in the workings of the universe. Galileo served as a professor at the University of Padua, and it was during this time that he began to question the accuracy of the Churches representation of the world. Galileo’s approach towards knowledge was much different then the afore mentioned Copernicus. Where as Copernicus presented his finding to the mercy of the church, Galileo wrote his conclusions and left the Roman Catholic Church interpret them as they chose. The very nature of his findings pitted him as an opponent of the church.

The Scientific Revolution was when modern science was essentially established, which came along with the major scientific discoveries took place at the time. Some major scientists that contributed to this major era include Nicholas Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton. The scientific revolution took place following the Renaissance, from the mid-1500’s until about 1700. This revolution took place throughout Europe. This occurred because, following the Renaissance and the reformation, people became very curious and wanted to understand how the Earth worked. It was almost as if, being that this occurred after the reformation, that they wanted to either confirm or refute the church’s claims. The significance of the scientific revolution was one of great proportions, it changed mankind’s understanding the importance of science, and of how the Earth and solar system function.

"The growth of commerce and industry led to the technological advances, which in turn stimulated, and were stimulated by science.” (p. 403) The European scientific revolution was fueled by the blending of “liberal” and “servile” arts, in other words, science and technology. Because of the European expansion taking place throughout the world, new commerce and industries were advancing, creating the need for new technology and science. The theories and inventions that Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton provided were the fist major advances during the scientific revolution, and perhaps were the most profound.

In terms of the PISCET categories discussed through the lectures and the text, the most prevalent threads between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment is in their intellectual, economic, and political connections. During the Scientific Revolution, the established ideas came from Aristotle. Aristotle’s conception of the workings of the universe—accepted to be a part of “Middle Ages cosmology” by professor Jones—set the empirical and rational standard that all scientists set their sights upon. “If one’s calculations did not fall inline with the Aristotelian standard, it must not have been correct” (Buckowski lecture notes). The revolutionary element came in the form of Ptolemy’s modifications to Aristotle’s standards to better fit the phenomena he was observing. It is here

This essay will explore parallels between the ideas of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. The scientific revolution describes a time when great changes occurred in the way the universe was viewed, d through the advances of sciences during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The enlightenment refers to a movement that grew out of the new scientific ideas of the revolution that occurred in the late seventeenth to eighteenth century. Although both the scientific revolution and enlightenment encapsulate different ideas, the scientific revolution laid the underlying ideological foundations for the enlightenment movement. A number of parallels

While Renaissance academics embraced the innovations of humanity to reason the purpose of life, seventeenth century scientists progressed beyond the abstraction of philosophy towards the concrete origins of humanity. With the potential to derive the foundation of the human experience, Europe embarked on a successive intellectual revolution, known colloquially as the Scientific Revolution. As scientists charted a new reality grounded in empirical evidence, the universally accepted explanations of biology, astronomy, and physics of Ancient Greece were systematically disproven. Contrary to previous academic rebirths, women were allowed to partake in exploration in a limited capacity. While the Scientific Revolution was characterized

Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans’ world view was affected by several scientific breakthroughs. This period of achievement is referred to as the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was not a single event, rather a series of events with contributions from many people. Some of its main causes include individuals, the book written by Nicolaus Copernicus, and the loss of power by the Catholic church. During this period, scholars made lasting contributions that continue to affect the modern world.

The Scientific Revolution was at its height during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with many supporters and critics of the works of scientists. It was the transition from the medieval, philosophical and religious perspective to a secular and rational perspective. One of the biggest debates that defined the Scientific Revolution was the debate over whether the universe was geocentric (with the earth at the center of the universe), or heliocentric (with the earth revolving around the sun). The works of these scientists was influenced by political leaders for their desire in power, the clash of ideas between religious leaders and institutions, and differentiation towards female scientists and unorganization in research. In all, each of these three parts of society contributed to the Scientific Revolution in very important ways.

The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, which spanned from the late 1500’s to 1700’s, shaped today’s modern world through disregarding past information and seeking answers on their own through the scientific method and other techniques created during the Enlightenment. Newton’s ‘Philsophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ and Diderot’s Encyclopedia were both composed of characteristics that developed this time period through the desire to understand all life, humans are capable of understanding the Earth, and a sense of independence from not having to rely on the nobles or church for knowledge.

The scientific revolution is traditionally considered to be framed between 1543—the year of On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres by Nicolaus