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,"Europe was in process of dramatic changes in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps the most striking evidence of this is the widespread use of the word 'new' in titles of books. Two of the best known were Galileo's Two New Sciences and Johannes Kepler's New Astronomy. The sense of 'newness' that prevailed in the seventeenth century was undoubtedly a consequence of the belief that much of the knowledge being made public was new, and that it represented significant departures from Aristotelian natural philosophy and the traditional wisdom of the ancients." was more mechanistic in its worldview and more integrated with mathematics, and was focused on the acquisition and interpretation of new evidence. Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). p. 136. .
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 French) Alexis Clairaut, "Du systeme du monde, dans les principes de la gravitation universelle", in "Histoires (& Memoires) de l'Academie Royale des Sciences" for 1745 (published 1749). 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.""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." 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."Since that revolution turned the authority in English not only of the Middle Ages but of the ancient world—since it started not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.... [It] looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance." Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1959) p. viii. 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 Cohen, I. Bernard. The Birth of a New Physics (Revised and Updated) (W.W. Norton & Company, 1985). p.24. 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. "Modern science was invented between 1572, when Tycho Brahe saw a nova, or new star, and 1704, when Newton published his Optics..." Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). p. 1. .
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:
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.Syfret (1948) p. 75
Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim that there was a revolutionary change in world view. In 1611 English poet John Donne wrote:
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."The key event that made the new intellectual life of Western Europe different than anything that had gone before is the emergence of the university as a unique and vital institution. Not only was it unique in the history of Western Europe, but it also was unique in the history of the world." Grant calls this "probably the greatest intellectual expropriation of knowledge" in human history."The translations from Arabic and Greek to Latin occurred during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The lengthy process represents what is probably the greatest intellectual expropriation of knowledge by one culture and civilization from other cultures and civilizations."
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.Hannam, p. 342 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.Grant, pp. 55–68, 87–116Pedersen, pp. 25, 106–10. 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,Kuhn, Thomas (1957) The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr. p. 142. Galileo,Galilei, Galileo (1974) Two New Sciences, trans. Stillman Drake, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Pr. pp. 217, 225, 296–67.Clagett, Marshall (1961) The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages. Madison, Univ. of Wisconsin Pr. pp. 218–19, 252–55, 346, 409–16, 547, 576–78, 673–82 Johannes Kepler reprinted in Eastwood, B.S. (1989) Astronomy and Optics from Pliny to Descartes, London: Variorum Reprints. and Newton all studied at universities founded during the High Middle Ages and all acknowledged their debts to earlier scholars.
Christianity
In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead argued that modern science inherited a "faith" in the power of human reason from medieval scholastics. Other 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 because many of its key figures had deeply held religious convictions and believed "themselves to be champions of a science that was more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas about the natural world that they replaced.""...historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions. ... Yet, many of the leading figures in the scientific revolution imagined themselves to be champions of a science that was more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas about the natural world that they replaced." In The Origins of Modern Science, 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."Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science (The Free Press, 1957). p.85. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all sincerely believed that the order and perfection of the universe were reflections of the perfection of its Creator. Far from perceiving their work as irreligious, they saw uncovering the hidden perfection of the universe using mathematics as an act of devout worship."It had almost been a mystical urge and a religious preoccupation which had impelled a man like Kepler to reduce the universe to mechanical law in order to show that God was consistent and reasonable - that He had not left things at the mercy even of his own caprice." Butterfield, Herbert. The Origins of Modern Science (The Free Press, 1957). p. 178.
Renaissance technology