The Scientific Revolution
Effects of the Scientific Revolution
- People felt that human understanding of the universe could be reduced to mathematical laws. - The universe was no longer appeared to be a mystery. In fact, people felt that it was orderly, rational, and, most importantly, could be understood by humans. - People felt that humans were able to control their own destiny. - The concept of natural laws developed. These laws, which were similar to the laws found in science by Newton, could govern other aspects of life as well, such as economics, politics, or ethics. - Science gained wider appeal and unprecedented popularity. Additionally, science was institutionalized, and scientific societies sprung up throughout Europe, on both the national and personal level. The institutions greatly helped the rate of progress. POSITIVE EFFECTS: - gain of knowledge - greater toleration (both religious and scientific) - less superstition and more scientific answers - freedom to deviate from established theories, which opened the door for new developments NEGATIVE EFFECTS: - loss of traditional faith - loss of faith in heaven - earth is no longer regarded as the center of the universe and God's pet project — the loss of belief in a caring God - skepticism - Overall, the Scientific Revolution was an era of optimism. People living during the Scientific Revolution felt that they had surpassed even the ancients and were at the peak of human knowledge, and ideas of progress dominated intellectual discussions.
Social Patterns During the Scientific Revolution
- Population decreased after the 16th century. In the 17th century, population began to rise again, leading to overcrowding in the cities, bigger armies, increased crime, more taxation, and beggars. - Social status became based on wealth and education as opposed to family heritage. The emphasis on education led to a higher literacy rate, which led to the start of newspapers and book sales. Woman also gained some opportunities in business. - In the East, peasants were reduced to serfdom. In the West, many were forced to go into the cities in search of a job.
Definition of the Scientific Revolution
- The Scientific Revolution (1543 - 1687) was a period of time in which many breakthrough discoveries were made in science and philosophy. During the Scientific Revolution, Europeans' perception of the universe and their role in it was changed forever. - Although at first the Scientific Revolution only affected the scientific and intellectual elite (about 5% of the population) the concepts that originated during the Scientific Revolution eventually spread to all of the population.
Causes of the Scientific Revolution
- The discovery of the New World led to the discovery of new plant and animal life, which potentially encouraged greater interest in the natural sciences. Also, the great advances made by Portuguese navigators in the 15th century helped fuel an interest in learning more about the stars. - Scientific knowledge was able to spread much more rapidly because of the printing press. By the second half of the 17th century, there were numerous books and newspapers to keep people informed about the most recent scientific discoveries. - The constant warfare between the various nation-states may have pushed scientific development by placing increasing importance on technology, especially since Europe was a region with many powerful leaders who could fund scientific development. Columbus, while Italian, could find funding for his voyages from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain even after being turned down by John of Portugal. In contrast, with few technological competitors and a single ruler able to cancel major projects, Chinese technological development slowed in comparison to that of Europe. - The Protestant Reformation, by encouraging people to read the Bible, helped create a more literate society. Although neither Luther nor Calvin were not interested in challenging the traditional scientific worldview, their opposition to the religious dominance of Rome did provide a powerful example of challenging established authority. - Interest in the writings of the classical world also extended to the scientific texts of the ancient Greeks. Certain texts, such as Archimedes's writings on mathematics and Galen's anatomical studies, were rediscovered in the Renaissance. Although the Scientific Revolution ultimately rejected the ideas contained in such works, this basic familiarity with the past was a necessary stage in order for modern scientific thought to mature.
The Copernican Revolution: Galileo Galilei
- The first scientist to build on Copernicus's work was the Florentine Galileo Galileo (1564-1642). In 1609, he heard about a Dutchman who had invented a spyglass that allowed distant objects to be seen as if close up. Galileo then designed his own telescope that magnified far-away objects 30 times the naked eye's capacity. Using this instrument, he noticed that the Moon had a mountainous surface very much like the Earth. For Galileo, this provided evidence that it was composed of material similar to that on Earth and not some purer substance as Aristotle had argued. Galileo also realized that the stars were much farther away than the planets. He saw that Jupiter had four moons, which challenged the idea of the unique relationship between Earth and her Moon. Sunspots and rings around Saturn also provided evidence against the Ptolemaic system. - Galileo may not have really thrown a ten- and one-pound weight from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but he did notice that heavier weights do not fall any faster than lighter ones. He also noticed that under ideal conditions a body in motion would tend to stay in motion. It was therefore relatively easy for him to deduce from this the possibility that Earth is in constant motion. - Following the publication of Galileo's Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632), the Catholic Church began to condemn his work. The church authorities warned him not to publish any more writings on astronomy, but instead of obeying, Galileo wrote a book that compared the new science with the old, with an ignorant clown called Simplicio representing the old science. Pope Urban VII, thinking the book was making fun of him, put Galileo under house arrest for the rest of his life. This did not stop Galileo from writing, although he decided to instead send his writings to Holland, where the mood was more tolerant.
Philosophers Influenced by the Scientific Revolution: Francis Bacon
Among the philosophers affected by the new science was Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon led quite a varied life, as a lawyer, an official in the government of James I, a historian, and an essayist. And while he did not perform scientific experiments, he also contributed to science in the field of experimental methodology. In his three major works, The Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620), and New Atlantis (1627), Bacon attacked scholasticism and its belief that knowledge was essentially complete, arguing that it was necessary to examine evidence from nature. Bacon's system became known as inductive reasoning, or empiricism. In France, this debate over the new learning became known as the conflict between the ancients and the moderns, while in England it was known as the "Battle of the Books."
Philosophers Influenced by the Scientific Revolution: René Descartes
French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) preferred deductive thought (also referred to as Rationalism), which refers to using reason to go from a general principle to the specific principle, to Bacon's inductive reasoning, believing that it provided for a better understanding of the universe. However, like Bacon, Descartes believed that the ideas of the past must all be doubted. In his famous quote, "I think, therefore I am," Descartes showed his belief in nothing but his own existence. Another way that Descartes rejected the past was by writing in French rather than Latin, which had been the language of intellectual discussion in the Middle Ages. Descartes was also a highly gifted mathematician and invented analytical mathematics. Descartes's system can be found in his Discourse on Method (1637). In the work, he reduced nature to two distinct elements: mind and matter. The world of the mind involved the soul and the spirit, a world he left to the theologians. The world of matter, however, was made up of an infinite number of particles.
The Copernican Revolution: Nicholas Copernicus
In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish mathematician and astronomer, wrote Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. As a priest, Copernicus was afraid of the implications of the ideas contained in the work, so he waited many years before publishing. When he did publish, Copernicus cautiously dedicated the book to Pope Paul III and included a preface that claimed the ideas in it were simply mathematical hypotheses. Also, since the Copernican, or Heliocentric, system explains that the planets move in a circular motion around the Sun, it did not completely eliminate all the epicycles.
Philosophers Influenced by the Scientific Revolution: John Locke
Like Hobbes, John Locke (1632-1704) was interested in the world of science. His Two Treatises on Government, written before the Revolution of 1688 but after William and Mary came to the throne, served as a defense of the revolution as well as a basis for the English Bill of Rights. It also proved important for the intellectual development of the founders of the United States. Locke argued that man is born free in nature, although as society gets more advanced, government is needed to organize this society. Because humans are free and rational entities, when they enter into a social contract with the state, they do not give up their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke was an opponent of religious enthusiasm. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke attacked the idea that Christianity could be spread by force. His Essay on Human Understanding contained the idea that children enter the world with no set ideas. At birth, the mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa, and infants do not possess the Christian concept of predestination or original sin. Instead, Locke theorized that all knowledge comes from experience.
Art During the Scientific Revolution (Mannerism and Baroque)
MANNERISM Mannerism featured distorted human figures, strange perspectives and unnatural colors and lighting. Mannerism reached its peak during the instability of the Reformation, and it reflected the concerns of a troubled time. The major Mannerist painter was El Greco (1541 - 1614). BAROQUE The Baroque style occurred during the Counter-Reformation, and it reflected the desire for grandeur and the wish to inspire and awe people with God's greatness. A famous baroque painter was Caravaggio (1571 - 1610) whose paintings were famous for their depictions of highly emotional moments. Other famous baroque painters were Rubens (1577 - 1640), and Veláquez (1599 - 1660), who glorified church figures and rulers. Bernini, a baroque sculptor and architect, did the inside and outside of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.
Philosophers Influenced by the Scientific Revolution: Blaise Pascal
Pascal (1623-1662) wanted to balance the ideas of the Jesuits with those of complete religious skeptics. His life's attempt to achieve this balance is found in his Pensées, particularly in that idea that became known as Pascal's Wager, in which Pascal concluded that it was better to believe in God than not to, because the expected value that comes with believing is always greater than the expected value of not believing. Pascal became involved with the Jansenists, a Catholic faction that saw truth in St. Augustine's idea of the total sinfulness of mankind and the need for salvation to be achieved through faith because we are predestined.
Science Before the Scientific Revolution
Prior to the Scientific Revolution, all scientific concepts came from either the Bible or ancient scientists. Since during the Middle Ages, most of the works of other ancient scientists were lost, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen became the only, and therefore ultimate, authorities, on their fields. The old beliefs came from: (1) THE BIBLE: The main source of information, in all respects, was the Bible, whose teachings were taken literally (for example, if a story stated that the world stopped spinning, Europeans believed that the world actually did stop spinning). (2) ARISTOTLE: Aristotle was the greatest philosopher of ancient times. He was viewed as the absolute authority on physics, although many of his theories were clearly wrong. For example, his theories included the belief that there was no movement without a mover (which fit in perfectly with church philosophy since it made it obvious that God was necessary to move the Earth) and that in their natural state all objects were at rest. He explained motion by the fact that each of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) wished to return to its natural place (for example, a stone falls because it wants to return to the earth). Air and fire, he said, always wished to go upwards and earth and water wished to fall downwards. (3) PTOLEMY: Ptolemy was a great astronomer from ancient times. He stated that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and all the planets moved around it. Since this alone was not able to mathematically explain retrograde motion, Ptolemy added in epicycles (circles within circles), which through some very complicated calculations could approximate planetary motion. (4) GALEN: Though his influence was far lesser than that of Aristotle and Ptolemy, Galen's medical and anatomical theories dominated the scientific world for years even though they were proved wrong by dissections.
Worldview Before the Scientific Revolution
SCHOLASTICISM The worldview in the Middle Ages was based on scholasticism, a combination of Christian theology and the scientific beliefs of the ancient authors. Knowledge of God remained the most important act of learning and was to be attained through both reason and revelation. The value of science was that it offered the possibility of a better understanding of God — to view science without this religious framework was inconceivable. ALCHEMY Influenced by the work of Aristotle, medieval people believed that the world was made up of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Earth was the heaviest of the elements and therefore represented the center of the universe. Water was also heavy but lighter than earth, so its natural place was covering the Earth. Air was lighter than water, but fire was the lightest of all four elements. It was this idea of the four elements that gave rise to the idea of alchemy, or the compound made of the four elements in their perfect proportions. Less perfect metals such as lead might be transformed by changing the proportion of their elements. In medicine, the four elements combined in the human body to create what were known as the four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The proportions of these humours determined a person's characteristics. ASTRONOMY People in the Middle Ages were not very interested in astronomy, so the popular work of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (c. 85-165 A.D.) was not questioned. The Ptolemaic, or Geocentric, system placed the Earth as a stationary object around which heavenly bodies moved, while the stars were fixed in their orbits. One problem with this system, the unusual motion of the planets in relation to the fixed stars, was realized rather early, so epicycles (planetary orbits within an orbit) were added to the system.
The Copernican Revolution: Tycho Brahe
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (15546-1601) came up with another Earth-centered system, in which the moon and sun revolved around the Earth, while the other planets revolved around the sun. Brahe had plenty of time on his hands to construct the best astronomical tables of the age, as his social life was nonexistent after he lost part of his nose in a duel and rebuilt it with a silver and gold prosthetic.
The Copernican Revolution: Sir Isaac Newton
The greatest figure of the Scientific Revolution was Isaac Newton (1642-1727), even though he was a very religious man. Newton worked for almost two decades on the issue of the planets' orbits (based on the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo) before publishing his masterpiece, Principia, in 1687. Newton wondered what force kept the planets in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, when theoretically they should be moving in a straight line. Supposedly, he saw an apple drop from a tree and deduced that the same force that drew the apple to the ground could explain planetary motion. He finally proposed that all planets and objects in the universe operated under the effect of gravity. He also experimented with optics, making the study of light a new scientific endeavor. It was Newton who showed that white light was a heterogeneous mixture of colors, rather than the pure light many believed it to be. He is also the father of differential calculus. Newton also eventually became head of the British Royal Society, an organization committed to spreading the new spirit of experimentation.
Philosophers Influenced by the Scientific Revolution: Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) personally knew Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes and was also friends with William Harvey (1578-1657), who, rather than relying on the writings of the Ancient Greeks, used dissections to show the role the heart plays in the circulation of blood through the body's. His contact with the leading figures in the world of science influenced Hobbes to apply the experimental methods they used in the study of nature to the study of politics. Hobbes was horrified by the turmoil of the English Revolution and was convinced that humans were corrupt by nature, and that humans were like animals in that they were driven by appetites rather than by noble ideas. In his classic work, Leviathan, Hobbes wrote that life without government was "nasty, brutish, and short." This belief led him to propose the necessity for absolutism. Men created states (which Hobbes called the great Leviathan) because they were necessary to restrain the human urges to destroy one another. Out of necessity, the sovereign has complete control over his subjects, and must put down rebellion by any means possible. When the parliamentary side won the civil war, Hobbes went back to England and quietly went on with his life. He readily accepted any established power, and could therefore live under Cromwell's firm rule. His theories did not please traditional English royals, however, because they were not based on the divine right of kings.
The Copernican Revolution: Johannesburg Kepler
Tycho Brahe's student, Johannesburg Kepler (1571-1630), disagreed with his teacher concerning Copernicus's findings. Kepler ended up using Brahe's own data to support Copernicus and eventually dropped Copernicus's theory that planets move in a circular motion, instead proposing that their orbits were elliptical. This theory would not be proved until the next age, by Isaac Newton.