The Scientific Revolution

Definition of the Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution was an epistemological transformation that swept over Europe in the seventeenth century. This period roughly began with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who asserted a heliocentric (sun-centered) cosmos, it ended with Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who proposed universal laws and a Mechanical Universe. However, we must note that historians have consistently disputed the presumed beginning and ending dates of the much-disputed 'Scientific Revolution', as some extend it to 1750, while others say it ended with the publication of Newton's Principia (1687).

Science, in the modern sense of the term, came into being during the Scientific Revolution, with the merging of the craft tradition with scientific theory and the evolution of the scientific method. Before this period, nothing like science in the modern sense existed. The feeling of dissatisfaction with the older philosophical approach had begun much earlier and had produced other results, such as the Protestant Reformation, but the revolution in science began with the work of gifted scientists, including Kepler, in the 16th century and reached full flower in the 17th cent.

The Scientific Revolution developed as an offshoot of the Renaissance. The same spirit of inquiry that fueled the Renaissance led scientists to question traditional beliefs about the workings of the universe. One of the main ideas to come out of the Scientific Revolution was the use of the Scientific Method. This period brought us what all scientists, chemists, biologists and physicists utilize today. The Scientific Method uses observation and experimentation to explain theories on how the universe works. At the beginning of the scientific revolution, science was highly based on Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, but at the end of this period, science was mathematical, mechanical, and empirical.

Factors Which Contributed to the Birth of the Scientific Revolution

There are numerous factors which led to the start of the Scientific Revolution in Europe. They are:
1. The Counter-Reformation of the Church during the Renaissance.
Many Europeans began to question the authority of the Church. Indeed, a large faction broke away from the Church, in doing so breaking free from the restriction of intellectual progress. The fierce censorship of the Church's response to the Reformation, the Counter- Reformation, further pushed people from the Catholic fold and appeared to many as foolishly protective of its outdated doctrines. In this atmosphere the Scientific Revolution blossomed, and the Aristotelian system, which the Church stood by fell.
2. The Optimism of the Renaissance Humanists
The optimism of Renaissance humanists was an early factor in the development of the Scientific Revolution. Europeans, having just endured two centuries of suffering in the form of black plague, starvation, the Hundred Years' War, economic collapse, and the religious insecurity of the Great Schism, emerged in the thirteenth century with a newfound sense of optimism. Weary of a culture of death and loss, they turned to their creativity and intelligence as the answer to alleviating human suffering. Instead of being a wretched soul completely subject to uncontrollable forces such as God, death, and Fortune, he is worthy of dignity and capable of taking control of his destiny.
3. The Printing Press
Probably the greatest contribution to the birth of the Scientific Revolution was the development of printing by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450s. Before the introduction of printing, scholars shared limited numbers of manuscripts, risked confusion by copyist errors and communicated with other scholars by letters. But after the development of movable type and cheaply produced paper, the information could be quickly and widely distributed. The Print Revolution made the complete realization of the scientific method possible.
4. Trade and Expansion of Trade
Navigational problems of sea voyages generated scientific research. Overseas specimens aroused people’s interest in different worlds. Navigation problems also needed mathematics to solve them.
5. Medieval Universities
The growth of universities where medieval philosophers had some independence from theologians also contributed to this. These universities established departments of astronomy, mathematics, and physics.

Nicolaus Copernicus
Copernicus, Nicholas, 1473–1543, Polish astronomer. The work that immortalized him is De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in which he set forth his beliefs concerning the universe, known as the Copernican system. That treatise, which was dedicated to Pope Paul III, was probably completed by 1530 but was not published until 1543, when Copernicus was on his deathbed. Modern astronomy was built upon the foundation of the Copernican system. The Copernican system can be summarized in seven propositions. They are:
There is no one center in the universe.
The Earth's center is not the center of the universe.
The center of the universe is near the sun.
The distance from the Earth to the sun is imperceptible compared with the distance to the stars.
The rotation of the Earth accounts for the apparent daily rotation of the stars.
The apparent annual cycle of movements of the sun is caused by the Earth revolving around the sun.
The apparent retrograde motion of the planets is caused by the motion of the Earth, from which one observes.
Johannes Kepler
Kepler, Johannes 1571–1630, German astronomer. From his student days at the Univ. of Tübingen, he was influenced by the Copernican teachings. From 1593 to 1598 he was professor of mathematics at Graz and while there wrote his Mysterium cosmographicum (1596). This work opened the way to friendly intercourse with Galileo and Tycho Brahe, and in 1600 Kepler became Tycho's assistant in his observatory near Prague. On Tycho's death (1601) Kepler succeeded him as court mathematician to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. In 1609 he published the results of Tycho's calculations of the orbit of Mars. In this celebrated work were stated the first two of what became known as Kepler's laws. In 1612, becoming mathematician to the states of Upper Austria, he moved to Linz. He wrote an epitome of the astronomy of Copernicus in 1618, and in 1619 De cometis and Harmonice mundi (in which was announced the third of Kepler's laws). In 1626, Kepler moved to Ulm. After his death his manuscript writings, bought by Catherine II of Russia, were placed in the observatory of Pulkovo.

His three laws of planetary motion were:

1. Kepler's elliptical orbit law:
The planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus.

2. Kepler's equal-area law:
The line connecting a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time.

3. Kepler's law of periods:
The time required for a planet to orbit the sun, called its period, is proportional to the long axis of the ellipse raised to the 3/2 power. The constant of proportionality is the same for all the planets.

Galileo Galilei
Galileo, 1564–1642, was a great Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist. By his persistent investigation of natural laws he laid foundations for modern experimental science, and by the construction of astronomical telescopes he greatly enlarged humanity's vision and conception of the universe. He gave a mathematical formulation to many physical laws. Some of Galileo’s fundamental contributions to modern astronomy include:

1. The Telescope
Galileo improved the telescope and was one of the first to use it to observe the sky, and for a time was one of very few people able to construct one good enough for the purpose. Based only on sketchy descriptions of the telescope, invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made his with greater magnification. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger).

2. Jupiter’s Moons
On January 7, 1610 Galileo, using his telescope, discovered Jupiter's four largest satellites (moons): Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would appear and disappear, which he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. Later astronomers overruled Galileo's naming of these objects, changing his Medicean stars to Galilean moons.

3. Sunspots
Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that Chinese astronomers had done so before. Galileo observed the Sun through his telescope and saw that the Sun had dark patches on it that we now call sunspots (he eventually went blind, perhaps from damage suffered by looking at the Sun with his telescope). Furthermore, he observed motion of the sunspots indicating that the Sun was rotating on an axis.

4. The Phases of Venus
Galileo noted that Venus exhibited a full set of phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. By contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth.

René Descartes

René Descartes (1596–1650), also known as Cartesius, was a noted French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Dubbed the "Founder of Modern Philosophy" and the "Father of Modern Mathematics," he ranks as one of the most important and influential thinkers of modern times. For good or bad, much of subsequent western philosophy is a reaction to his writings, which have been closely studied from his time down to the present day. Descartes was one of the key thinkers of the Scientific Revolution in the Western World.

Descartes is often regarded as the first modern thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural sciences as these began to develop. His most famous statement is ‘Cogito ergo sum’, which in English translates to ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Discourse on Method. 1637).

Apart from philosophy, Descartes was the inventor of the Cartesian coordinate system used in plane geometry and algebra. Descartes founded analytic geometry, that bridge between algebra and geometry crucial to the invention of the calculus and analysis. Descartes' reflections on mind and mechanism began the strain of western thought that much later, impelled by the invention of the electronic computer and by the possibility of machine intelligence, blossomed into.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman and essayist. He began his professional life as a lawyer, but he has become best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. His works establish and popularize an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method. Induction implies drawing knowledge from the natural world through experimentation, observation, and testing of hypotheses.

The Baconian method involved the collection of data, their judicious interpretation, the carrying out of experiments, thus to learn the secrets of nature by organized observation of its regularities. Bacon's proposals had a powerful influence on the development of science in seventeenth century Europe.

His famous aphorism, ‘knowledge is power’, is found in the Meditations. Bacon did not propose an actual philosophy, but rather a method of developing philosophy; he wrote that, whilst philosophy at the time used the deductive syllogism to interpret nature, the philosopher should instead proceed through inductive reasoning from fact to axiom to law. Bacon's developments of the inductive philosophy would revolutionize the future thought of the human race. Many members of the British Royal Society saw Bacon as advocating the kind of enquiry conducted by that society.

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (January 4, 1643 – March 31, 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, inventor, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the most influential scientists in history. Newton was a fellow of the Royal Society of England. Newton summarized his discoveries in terrestrial and celestial mechanics in his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [mathematical principles of natural philosophy] (1687), one of the greatest milestones in the history of science, wherein he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. In it he showed how his principle of universal gravitation provided an explanation both of falling bodies on the earth and of the motions of planets, comets, and other bodies in the heavens.

1. Newton's First Law: Law of Inertia (or Galileo’s Law)
"An object at rest or traveling in uniform motion will remain at rest or traveling in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net force."
2. Newton's second law: Law of Motion
“The rate of change of momentum of a body is equal to the resultant force acting on the body and is in the same direction.”
3. Newton's third law: Law of reciprocal actions
“All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.”

Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realized that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism, and notably argued that light is composed of particles.

Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner (May 17, 1749 – January 26, 1823) was an English country doctor who studied nature and his natural surroundings from childhood and practiced medicine in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England. He is famous as the first doctor to introduce and study the smallpox vaccine. He laid the groundwork for the science of immunology.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1788, following a careful study combining observation, experiment and dissection into a description of the previously misunderstood life of the cuckoo in the nest.

His description of the newly-hatched cuckoo pushing its host's eggs and fledglings from the nest (contrary to the existing belief that the adult cuckoo did it) was only confirmed in the 20th century when photography became feasible. Having observed the behaviour, he demonstrated an anatomical adaptation for it—the baby cuckoo has a depression in its back which is not present after 12 days of life, in which it cups eggs and other chicks to push them out of the nest. It had been assumed that the adult bird did this, but the adult does not remain in the area for sufficiently long.

His invaluable experiments beginning in 1796 with the vaccination of eight-year-old James Phipps proved that cowpox provided immunity against smallpox. His discovery was instrumental in ridding many areas of the world of a dread disease and laid the foundations of modern immunology as a science.

William Harvey

William Harvey (April 1, 1578–June 3, 1657) was an English physician considered by many to have laid the foundation of modern medicine. Harvey was first to demonstrate the function of the heart and the complete circulation of the blood, a feat especially remarkable because it was accomplished without the aid of a microscope. Acceptance of his theories was slow in coming, and it was not until 1827 that they were fully substantiated. He also contributed greatly to the advance of comparative anatomy and embryology. He also hypothesized the existence of a mammalian egg, and dissected dozens of deer in the King's hunting park in hopes of finding one, although he failed to do so.

Joseph Lister
Joseph Lister, (April 5, 1827 – February 10, 1912) was a famous British surgeon who promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He successfully introduced carbolic acid to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.

He brought to surgery the principle of antisepsis, an outgrowth of Pasteur's theory that bacteria cause infection. In 1865, Lister proved the effectiveness of his methods, thus founding modern antiseptic surgery. Using carbolic acid as the antiseptic agent, he devised techniques of applying it that, when used in conjunction with his heat sterilization of instruments, brought about dramatic decreases in postoperative fatality. He developed absorbable ligatures and the drainage tube, both of which have come into general use for wounds and incisions.

Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (August 26, 1743 – May 8, 1794) was a French nobleman, chemist, physicist, financer, biologist, and economist. The "father of modern chemistry," he stated the first version of the Law of Conservation of Matter, recognized and named oxygen (1778), disproved the phlogiston theory, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature.

Much of his work was the result of extending and coordinating the research of others; his concepts were largely evolved through his superior ability to organize and interpret and were substantiated by his own experiments. He was one of the first to introduce effective quantitative methods in the study of chemical reactions. He explained combustion and thereby discredited the phlogiston theory. He also described clearly the role of oxygen in the respiration of both animals and plants. His classification of substances is the basis of the modern distinction between chemical elements and compounds and of the system of chemical nomenclature. He also conducted experiments to establish the composition of water and of many organic compounds.

John Dalton

John Dalton, 1766–1844, was an English scientist. He revived the atomic theory (see atom), which he formulated in the first volume of his New System of Chemical Philosophy. He had already applied the concept to a table of atomic weights (1803), in a paper (1805) on the absorption of gases, and in developing his famous law of partial pressures, known also as Dalton's law. His interest in weather conditions led him to keep daily records from 1787 and to write Meteorological Observations and Essays. Dalton, himself afflicted with color blindness, investigated the condition, known also as Daltonism. From 1793 he taught mathematics and physical sciences at New College, Manchester. He was a member of the Royal Society (from 1822) and in 1825 received its medal for his work on the atomic theory

The five main points of Dalton's Atomic Theory are:
· Elements are made of tiny particles called atoms
· All atoms of a given element are identical
· The atoms of a given element are different than those of any other element
· Atoms of one element can combine with atoms of other elements to form compounds. A given compound always has the same relative numbers of types of atoms.
· Atoms cannot be created, divided into smaller particles, or destroyed in the chemical process. A chemical reaction simply changes the way atoms are grouped together.

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British naturalist who achieved lasting fame by convincing the scientific community of the occurrence of evolution and proposing the theory that this could be explained through natural and sexual selection. This theory is now considered the central explanatory paradigm in biology. He firmly established the theory of organic evolution known as Darwinism.

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday, (September 22, 1791 – August 25, 1867) was a British scientist (a physicist and chemist) who contributed significantly to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. He also invented the earliest form of the device that was to become the Bunsen burner, which is used almost universally in science laboratories as a convenient source of heat.

Michael Faraday is considered to have been one of the great scientists in history. Some historians of science refer to him as the greatest experimentalist in the history of science. It was largely due to his efforts that electricity became viable for use in. In 1845 he discovered what is now called the Faraday Effect and the phenomenon that he named diamagnetism.

Conclusion

The defining feature of the Scientific Revolution is that it changed all scientific thought changed during a relatively short period of time. Within a century and a half, man's conception of himself and the universe he inhabited was altered, and the scholastic method of reasoning was replaced by new scientific methods. With the discoveries, inventions and theories of a number of great scientists and theories, the Scientific Revolution became one of the most impacting eras in history, with lasting effects on the modern world. Essentially, the scientific revolution occurred in one quick bound and the advances made from the 17th century onward appear as little skips in comparison.