This article is about the period or event in history, not the process of scientific progress via revolution, proposed by Thomas Kuhn and discussed at Paradigm shift
In the history of science, the scientific revolution was the period that roughly began with the discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, and others at the dawn of the 17th century, ended with the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton, and led to a new period in Europe called the Age of Enlightenment. As with many historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about these boundaries, with some arguing that the proper start of the scientific revolution was the publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, while others extending it into the 18th century, and yet others even denying its very existence. Some argue for only partial change, noting that most advances occurred in astronomy and to a lesser extent mechanics and medicine. Revolutions in chemistry and biology did not occur until the 18th and 19th centuries.
The standard theory of the history of the scientific revolution claims the seventeenth century was a period of major scientific changes. It is claimed that not only were there major theoretical and experimental developments, but that even more importantly, the way in which scientists worked was radically changed. Some claim that at the beginning of the century, science was highly Aristotelian, while at its end, science was mechanical, and empirical. But an alternative view is that science as exemplified by Newton's Principia was anti-mechanist and highly Aristotelian, being specifically directed at the refutation of anti-Aristotelian Cartesian mechanism, as evidenced in the Principia quotations below, and not more empirical than it already was at the beginning of the century or earlier in the works of such as Benedetti, Galileo, Kepler and others.
Since the time of Voltaire, some observers have considered that a revolutionary change in thought, called in recent times a scientific revolution, took place around the year 1600; that is, that there were dramatic and historically rapid changes in the ways in which scholars thought about the physical world and studied it. Science, as it is treated in this account, is essentially understood and practiced in the modern world; with various "other narratives" or alternate ways of knowing omitted.
In the ancient world, Greek was the primary language of science. After the split of the Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek sharply decreased in western Europe, limiting access to all but the few scientific works that had been translated into Latin. Many ancient works were only known in the West through Latin encyclopedists. Much had to be gleaned from non-scientific sources: Roman surveying manuals were read for what geometry was included. By the 11th century, interest in scientific questions was growing, as work from antiquity became increasingly available.
Key influences in this period include: *Galen's belief that there were four bodily humors and that sickness was caused by an imbalance of any of the humors. His work in anatomy was widely known. *Ptolemy's calculations of planetary motion. (This and Galen's anatomy, though largely superseded by later work, are nevertheless important contributions to science.) Ptolemy believed that the earth was the center of the universe. *Aristotle's belief that God placed earth at the center of the universe with a hierarchical order to the Universe. The universe, according to Aristotle consisted of concentric spheres. All bodies naturally moved toward the center and moved toward rest, therefore a god must exist in order to move things into motion. *The ancient belief in the four classical elementssupported by the Greek philosophers Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, and others.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, a mass of classical Greek texts were translated into Arabic, followed by a flurry of commentaries by Islamic thinkers. By the mid-11th century, further translation into Latin had begun in Northern Spain, and the recapture of Toledo and Sicily in the late 11th century allowed the translation to begin in earnest by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. Scholars came from around Europe to aid in translation. Gerard of Cremona is a good example of an Italian who came to Spain to copy a single text and stayed on to translate over a thousand works. His biography described how he came to Toledo, "There, seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, in order to be able to translate."
In many instances, the late Greek and Arabic commentaries were more significant than the original work itself. Unsurprisingly, many found the translated ancient works obscure and confusing, and the commentaries aided in understanding the original text.
Alhazen's seven volume treatise on optics Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) (written from 1015 to 1021) is possibly the earliest work to use the scientific method. The ancient Greeks believed that truth was determined by the logic and beauty of reasoning; experiment was used as a demonstration. Alhazen used the results of experiments to test theories. The "emission" theory of light had been supported by Euclid and Ptolemy. This theory postulated that sight worked by the eye emitting light. The second or "intromission" theory, supported by Aristotle had light entering the eye. Alhazen performed experiments to determine that the "intromission" theory was scientifically correct.
In 1543 Copernicus' work on the heliocentric model of the solar system was published, in which he tried to prove that the sun was the center of the universe. Ironically, this was at the behest of the Catholic Church as part of the Catholic Reformation efforts for a means of creating a more accurate calendar for its activities. For almost two millennia, the geocentric model had been accepted by all but a few astronomers. The idea that the earth moved around the sun, as advocated by Copernicus, was to most of his contemporaries preposterous. It contradicted not only the virtually unquestioned Aristotelian philosophy, but also common sense. For suppose the earth turns about its own axis. Then, surely, if we were to drop a stone from a high tower, the earth would rotate beneath it while it fell, thus causing the stone to land some space away from the tower's bottom. This effect is not observed.
It is no wonder, then, that although some astronomers used the Copernican system to calculate the movement of the planets, only a handful actually accepted it as true theory. It took the efforts of two men, Johannes Kepler and Galileo, to give it credibility. Kepler was a brilliant astronomer who, using the very accurate observations of Tycho Brahe, realized that the planets move around the sun not in circular orbits, but in elliptical ones. Together with his other laws of planetary motion, this allowed him to create a model of the solar system that was a huge improvement over Copernicus' original system. Galileo's main contributions to the acceptance of the heliocentric system were his mechanics and the observations he made with his telescope, as well as his detailed presentation of the case for the system (which led to his condemnation by the Inquisition). Using an early theory of inertia, Galileo could explain why rocks dropped from a tower fall straight down even if the earth rotates. His observations of the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the spots on the sun, and mountains on the moon all helped to discredit the Aristotelian philosophy and the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system. Through their combined discoveries, the heliocentric system gained more and more support, and at the end of the 17th century it was generally accepted by astronomers.
Both Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Galileo's mechanics culminated in the work of Isaac Newton. His laws of motion were to be the solid foundation of mechanics; his law of universal gravitation combined terrestrial and celestial mechanics into one great system that seemed to be able to describe the whole world in mathematical formulae.
Not only astronomy and mechanics were greatly changed. Optics, for instance, was revolutionized by people like Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens and, once again, Isaac Newton, who developed mathematical theories of light as either waves (Huygens) or particles (Newton). Similar developments could be seen in chemistry, biology and other sciences, although their full development into modern science was delayed for a century or more.
Adherents of the Scientific Revolution traditionally maintain its most important changes were in the way in which scientific investigation was conducted, as well as the philosophy underlying scientific developments. Two main philosophical changes are said to be mechanization (or mechanical philosophy), and empiricism.
Mechanization
Aristotle recognized four kinds of causes, of which the most important was the "final cause". The final cause was the aim or goal of something. Thus, the final cause of rain was to let plants grow. Until the scientific revolution, it was very natural to see such goals in nature. The world was inhabited by angels and demons, spirits and souls, occult powers and mystical principles. Scientists spoke about the 'soul of a magnet' as easily as they spoke about its velocity.
But this philosophy was refuted by Isaac Newton's Theory of Gravity, which acted at a distance, and together with Newton's force of inertia, replaced Cartesian mechanism's vortices in explaining the motions of planets and comets. The concluding General Scholium of the 1713 2nd Edition of the Principia was anti-mechanist, and opened "The hypothesis of vortices is beset with many difficulties." As Newton put his crucial objection:"And all these regular motions [of the planets and their moons] do not have their origin in mechanical causes, since comets go freely in very eccentric orbits and into all parts of the heavens." [p940 Cohen & Whitman Principia] Newton posited the solar system and fixed stars were all designed and maintained by an all pervading intelligence, namely God, and whose will sets final causes, such as setting the stars sufficiently far apart to avoid their mutual gravitational collapse in a big crunch. Thus Newton wrote:
"This most elegant system of the sun, planets and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of similar systems, they will all be constructed according to a similar design and subject to the dominion of ONE... And so that systems of the fixed stars will not fall upon one another as a result of their gravity, he has placed them at immense distances from one another." [ibid p940]
"We know [God] only by his properties and attributes and by the wisest and best construction of things and their final causes...and a god without dominion, providence and final causes is nothing other than fate and nature." [ibid p942] "This concludes the discussion of God, and to treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of natural philosophy." [ibid p943]
Empiricism
The Aristotelian scientific tradition's primary mode of interacting with the world was through observation and searching for "natural" circumstances. It saw what we would today consider "experiments" to be contrivances which at best revealed only contingent and un-universal facts about nature in an artificial state. Coupled with this approach was the belief that rare events which seemed to contradict theoretical models were "monsters", telling nothing about nature as it "naturally" was. During the scientific revolution, changing perceptions about the role of the scientist in respect to nature, the value of evidence, experimental or observed, led towards a scientific methodology in which empiricism played a large, but not absolute, role.
Under the influence of philosophers like Francis Bacon, an empirical tradition was developed in the 17th century. The Aristotelian belief of natural and artificial circumstances was abandoned, and a research tradition of systematic experimentation was slowly accepted throughout the scientific community. Bacon's philosophy of using an inductive approach to nature â€" to abandon assumption and to attempt to simply observe with an open mind â€" was in strict contrast with the earlier, Aristotelian approach of deduction, by which analysis of "known facts" produced further understanding. In practice, of course, many scientists (and philosophers) believed that a healthy mix of both was neededâ€"the willingness to question assumptions, yet also interpret observations assumed to have some degree of validity.
At the end of the scientific revolution the organic, qualitative world of book-reading philosophers had been changed into a mechanical, mathematical world to be known through experimental research. Though it is certainly not true that Newtonian science was like modern science in all respects, it conceptually resembled ours in many waysâ€"much more so than the Aristotelian science of a century earlier. Many of the hallmarks of modern science, especially in respect to the institution and profession of science, would not become standard until the mid-19th century.
A recent trend in the literary field of cultural materialism questions whether there was a scientific revolution, or, if a revolution occurred, it questions whether it was important. Literary critics who hold this point of view have a unique (and some would claim, mistaken), definition of what the term revolution means. These literary critics hold that if a scientific revolution did not occur instantaneously, and without historical precedent, then by definition it cannot be a revolution, and can only be an evolution . If the scientific revolution was only an evolution, then it would have little or no intelligibility as a single event, but nonetheless, like all evolutionary processes, "the scientific evolution" invites serious consideration as a process or group of processes, in order to understand if and how language, culture and society have changed and are changing as a result . The scientific revolution, as a change in theoretical outlook, is normally identified as a four step process (this is not true of 'scientific practice' which is much less clearly definable historically).
First, Galileo is seen as the father of theoretical experimentalism, in that he legitimized observation, as opposed to pure reason, as a route to authentic knowledge, and presented the observations (for instance, in his falling body experiments) with an analysis that had the rigour of Euclidean proof.
Second (but not subsequent to, or, in direct conjunction with Galileo) Francis Bacon projects (what we would now think of as) the Galilean "experimental truth revealing process" onto the entire map of the natural universe, setting forth an agenda for every natural phenomenon then known, to be subjected to experimental scrutiny.
Third, Robert Boyle sets about regularizing Galileo's experimental work as characterized by his reports of "falling bodies experiments" into a practical method for ensuring that the observational process accumulates a body of knowledge which is public, thorough and self-correcting by the practice of publication, replication and review of scientific experiments.
Fourth, Newton produces the first widely read works which purport to address the most significant fundamental natural processes with Boylean rigour.
Although cultural materialism doesn't necessarily dismiss the main thrust of these claims, it does not accept that they fully account for the changes which are attributed to them, or that they reflect the nature or even the points in time when the relevant changes occurred. If Boyle's public science model coexisted with pre-scientific disciplines, then the revolution was romanticised by their biographers, who wished to paint a picture of the 'new wisdom' being adopted at the same time as the abandonment of the wicked, secretive and pagan practices of the pre-scientific mystics.
*Howard Margolis: It Started with Copernicus. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002 ISBN 0-07-138507-X *Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0-266-75021-3 *H. Floris Cohen The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographical Enquiry, University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0226112802 *Sir Thomas HeathMathematics in Aristotle ISBN 1855065649
