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 (On the Workings of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius and De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) 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.
Terminology and periodisation The word "revolution" has been used to describe scientific upheaval since at least the 18th century. In 1747, the French mathematician Alexis Clairaut applied it to Isaac Newton. In the 19th century William Whewell chose it to label "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." In the 20th century, Alexandre Koyré used the term "scientific revolution" to describe a "mutation" in human intellect. The term was popularized by the historian and philosopher of history Herbert Butterfield in his Origins of Modern Science who provocatively asserted that "it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity" in European history. The Scientific Revolution is widely understood by scholars as synonymous with the emergence of "modern" science. While the Scientific Revolution is frequently said to have begun in 1543 with the printings of De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius and De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus and to be complete in the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia, other historians have proposed 1572, when Tycho Brahe observed the 1572 supernova, as an alternative starting date.
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:
Rapid accumulation of knowledge, which has characterized the development of science since the 17th century, had never occurred before that time. The new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years. (Since the 19th century, scientific knowledge has been assimilated by the rest of the world).
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. Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim that there was a revolutionary change in world view. In 1611 English poet John Donne wrote:
[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. David Wootton calls the Scientific Revolution "the most important transformation in human history" since the Neolithic Revolution.
Ancient, medieval and Renaissance background
Medieval Translations
According to historians Thomas Kuhn and Edward Grant, the Scientific Revolution - carried out by scholars who used Latin as a common language - was built upon the foundation of translations, from Greek and Arabic to Latin starting in the 10th century and accelerating during the 12th and 13th centuries, of ancient Greek learning, Roman/Byzantine science and medieval Islamic science combined with the emergence of the medieval university. Grant calls this "probably the greatest intellectual expropriation of knowledge" in human history.
By the 16th century, the Aristotelian framework dominated Europe's intellectual landscape, though historians like James Hannam argue it was already fading and partly discredited. Aristotle's universe was both geocentric and hierarchical: an imperfect terrestrial region of four classical elements - earth, water, air, and fire - seeking their 'natural places' was surrounded by an unchanging celestial realm. This celestial region consisted of nested spherical shells composed of a fifth element, aether, which moved only with either perfect, circular motion or combinations of such perfect circular motions. Ptolemy’s Almagest provided the mathematically rigorous framework for calculating planetary positions. While the breakthroughs that created modern astronomy and modern physics during the 16th and 17th centuries marked a decisive rupture with Renaissance Aristotelianism, this was still a break with an existing tradition, not a creation from nothing. In that sense, the scholastics who recovered, assimilated and argued about ancient learning were a prerequisite for the Revolution. Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler and Newton all studied at universities founded during the High Middle Ages and all acknowledged their debts to earlier scholars.
Christianity
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