Chapter 16 Part 1!

Empire and Natural History - What scholars emphasized - Early modern scholars publishing stuff - The knowledge - Audiences at home

More recently scholars have emphasized the impact of Europe's overseas empires on the accumulation and transmission of knowledge about the natural world. Thus, moving beyond Ptolemy's Geography was as important for the emergence of modern science as overturning his cosmography. Building on the rediscovery of Theophrastus's botanical treatise and other classical texts, early modern scholars published new works cataloguing forms of life in northern Europe, Asia, and the Americas that were unknown to the ancients. These encyclopedias of natural history included realistic drawings and descriptions that emphasized the usefulness of animal and plant species for trade, medicine, food, and other practical concerns. Much of the new knowledge contained in such works resulted from scientific expeditions, often sponsored by European governments eager to learn about and profit from their imperial holdings. Spain took an early lead in such voyages, given their early conquests in the Americas. The physician of King Philip II of Spain spent seven years in New Spain in the 1560s recording thousands of plant species and interviewing local healers about their medicinal properties. Other countries followed suit as their global empires expanded. Audiences at home eagerly read the accounts of naturalists, who braved the heat, insects, and diseases of tropical jungles to bring home exotic animal, vegetable, and mineral specimens. They heard much less about the many indigenous guides, translators, and practitioners of medicine and science who made these expeditions possible and who contributed rich local knowledge about animal and plant species. In this period the craze for collecting natural history specimens in Europe extended from aristocratic lords to middle-class amateurs. Many public museums, like the British Museum in London, began with the donation of a large private collection.

Science and Society

The rise of modern science had many consequences, some of which are still unfolding. First, it went hand in hand with the rise of a new social group — the international scientific community. Members of this community were linked together by common interests and shared values as well as by journals and the learned scientific societies founded in many countries in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The personal success of scientists and scholars depended on making new discoveries, and science became competitive. Second, as governments intervened to support and sometimes direct research, the new scientific community became closely tied to the state and its agendas, a development strongly endorsed by Francis Bacon in England. In addition to England's Royal Society, academies of science were created under state sponsorship in Paris in 1666, Berlin in 1700, and later across Europe. At the same time, scientists developed a critical attitude toward established authority that would inspire thinkers to question traditions in other domains as well. It was long believed that the Scientific Revolution had little relationship to practical concerns and the life of the masses until the late-eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. More recently, historians have emphasized the crossover between the work of artisans and the rise of science, particularly in the development of the experimental method. Many craftsmen developed strong interest in emerging scientific ideas and, in turn, the practice of science in the seventeenth century often relied on artisans' expertise in making instruments and conducting precise experiments. Some things did not change in the Scientific Revolution. Scholars have noted that nature was often depicted as a female, whose veil of secrecy needed to be stripped away and penetrated by male experts. New "rational" methods for approaching nature did not question traditional inequalities between the sexes — and may have worsened them in some ways. For example, the rise of universities and other professional institutions for science raised new barriers because most of these organizations did not accept women. There were, however, a number of noteworthy exceptions. In Italy, universities and academies did offer posts to women, attracting some foreigners spurned at home. Women across Europe worked as makers of wax anatomical models and as botanical and zoological illustrators, like Maria Sibylla Merian. They were also very much involved in informal scientific communities, attending salons (see page 522), participating in scientific experiments, and writing learned treatises. Some female intellectuals became full-fledged members of the philosophical dialogue. In England, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Mary Astell all contributed to debates about Descartes's mind-body dualism, among other issues. Descartes himself conducted an intellectual correspondence with the princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, of whom he stated: "I attach more weight to her judgment than to those messieurs the Doctors, who take for a rule of truth the opinions of Aristotle rather than the evidence of reason."6 By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, many of the scientific ideas that would eventually coalesce into a new worldview had been assembled. Yet Christian Europe was still strongly attached to its established political and social structures and its traditional spiritual beliefs. By 1775, however, a large portion of western Europe's educated elite had embraced the new ideas. This was the work of many men and women across Europe who participated in the Enlightenment, either as publishers, writers, and distributors of texts or as members of the eager public that consumed them.

Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Method - Bacon / Descrates - More on Bacon - More on Descartes

Two important thinkers, Francis Bacon and René Descartes, were influential in describing and advocating for improved scientific methods based, respectively, on experimentation and mathematical reasoning. English politician and writer Francis Bacon was the greatest early propagandist for the new experimental method. Bacon argued that new knowledge had to be pursued through empirical research. Bacon formalized the empirical method, which had been used by Brahe and Galileo, into the general theory of inductive reasoning known as empiricism. Bacon's work, and his prestige as lord chancellor under James I, led to the widespread adoption of what was called "experimental philosophy" in England after his death. In 1660 followers of Bacon created the Royal Society, which met weekly to conduct experiments and discuss the latest findings of scholars across Europe. On the continent, more speculative methods retained support. French philosopher René Descartes was a multitalented genius who made his first great discovery in mathematics. As a 23-year-old soldier in the Thirty Years' War, he experienced a life-changing intellectual vision one night in 1619. Descartes saw that there was a perfect correspondence between geometry and algebra and that geometrical spatial figures could be expressed as algebraic equations and vice versa. A major step forward in the history of mathematics, Descartes's discovery of analytic geometry provided scientists with an important new tool. Descartes used mathematics to elaborate a highly influential vision of the workings of the cosmos. Accepting Galileo's claim that all elements of the universe are composed of the same matter, Descartes began to investigate the basic nature of matter. Drawing on ancient Greek atomist philosophies, Descartes developed the idea that matter was made up of identical "corpuscules" that collided together in an endless series of motions. All occurrences in nature could be analyzed as matter in motion and, according to Descartes, the total "quantity of motion" in the universe was constant. Descartes's mechanistic view of the universe depended on the idea that a vacuum was impossible, which meant that every action had an equal reaction, continuing in an eternal chain reaction. Although Descartes's hypothesis about the vacuum was proved wrong, his notion of a mechanistic universe intelligible through the physics of motion proved inspirational. Decades later, Newton rejected Descartes's idea of a full universe and several of his other ideas, but retained the notion of a mechanistic universe as a key element of his own system. Descartes's greatest achievement was to develop his initial vision into a whole philosophy of knowledge and science. The Aristotelian cosmos was appealing in part because it corresponded with the evidence of the human senses. When the senses were proven to be wrong, Descartes decided it was necessary to doubt them and everything that could reasonably be doubted, and then, as in geometry, to use deductive reasoning from self-evident truths, which he called "first principles," to ascertain scientific laws. Descartes's reasoning ultimately reduced all substances to "matter" and "mind" — that is, to the physical and the spiritual. The devout Descartes believed that God had endowed man with reason for a purpose and that rational speculation could provide a path to the truths of creation. His view of the world as consisting of two fundamental entities is known as Cartesian dualism. Descartes's thought was highly influential in France and the Netherlands, but less so in England, where experimental philosophy won the day. Both Bacon's inductive experimentalism and Descartes's deductive mathematical reasoning had their faults. Bacon's inability to appreciate the importance of mathematics and his obsession with practical results clearly showed the limitations of antitheoretical empiricism. Likewise, some of Descartes's positions demonstrated the inadequacy of rigid, dogmatic rationalism. For example, he believed that it was possible to deduce the whole science of medicine from first principles. Although insufficient on their own, Bacon's and Descartes's extreme approaches are combined in the modern scientific method, which began to crystallize in the late seventeenth century.

Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo: Proving Copernicus Right - Tycho Brahe - What Brahe did - Johannes Kepler - Kepler's three rule things - The impact - Why Kepler was a genius - What Kepler was not - Galileo Galilei - Galileo's early experiments - Galileo + astronomy

One astronomer who agreed with Copernicus was Tycho Brahe. Brahe became interested in astronomy as a young boy and spent many nights gazing at the skies. Brahe established himself as Europe's leading astronomer with his detailed observations of the new star of 1572. Aided by generous grants from the king of Denmark, Brahe built the most sophisticated observatory of his day. Brahe acquired a new patron in the HRE Rudolph II and built a new observatory in Prague. In return for the emperor's support, he pledged to create new tables of planetary motions, dubbed the Rudolphine Tables. Brahe observed the stars and planets and compiled much more complete data than ever before. His limited understanding of mathematics and his death prevented him from making much sense out of his mass of data. Part Ptolemaic, part Copernican, he believed that all the planets except the earth revolved around the sun and that the entire group of sun and planets revolved in turn around the earth-moon system. It was left to Brahe's young assistant, Johannes Kepler, to rework Brahe's observations. From a minor German noble family, Kepler suffered a bout of smallpox as a small child, leaving him with damaged hands and eyesight. A brilliant mathematician, Kepler was inspired by his belief that the universe was built on mystical mathematical relationships and a musical harmony of the heavenly bodies. Kepler's examination of his predecessor's findings convinced him that Ptolemy's astronomy could not explain them. Kepler developed three new and revolutionary laws of planetary motion. First, through observations of Mars, he demonstrated that the orbits of the planets around the sun are elliptical. Second, he demonstrated that planets do not move at a uniform speed in their orbits. When a planet is close to the sun it moves more rapidly, and it slows as it moves farther away from the sun. Kepler published the first two laws in his book, The New Astronomy, which heralded the arrival of an entirely new theory of the cosmos. Kepler put forth his third law: the time a planet takes to make its complete orbit is precisely related to its distance from the sun. Kepler's contribution was monumental. Whereas Copernicus used mathematics to describe planetary movement, Kepler proved the precise relations of a sun-centered system. He united the theoretical cosmology of natural philosophy with mathematics. His work demolished the old system of Aristotle and Ptolemy, and with his third law he came close to formulating the idea of universal gravitation. In 1627 he also fulfilled Brahe's pledge by completing the Rudolphine Tables begun so many years earlier. These tables were used by astronomers for many years. Kepler was a genius with many talents. He pioneered the field of optics. He was the first to explain the role of refraction within the eye in creating vision, and he invented an improved telescope. He was also a great mathematician whose work furnished the basis for integral calculus and advances in geometry. Kepler was not the consummate modern scientist that these achievements suggest. His duties as court mathematician included casting horoscopes, and he based his life on astrological principles. He wrote at length on cosmic harmonies and explained elliptical motion through ideas about the beautiful music created by the motion of the planets. Kepler's fictional account of travel to the moon, written partly to illustrate the idea of a non-earth-centered universe, caused controversy and may have contributed to the arrest and trial of his mother as a witch in 1620. Kepler also suffered deeply as a result of his unorthodox brand of Lutheranism, which led to his rejection by both Lutherans and Catholics. His career exemplifies the complex interweaving of ideas and beliefs in the emerging science of his day. Young Florentine Galileo Galilei was challenging all the old ideas about motion. Galileo was a poor nobleman first marked for a religious career. His fascination with mathematics led to a professorship in which he examined motion and mechanics in a new way. His great achievement was the elaboration and consolidation of the experimental method. That is, rather than speculate about what might or should happen, Galileo conducted controlled experiments to find out what actually did happen. In his early experiments, Galileo focused on deficiencies in Aristotle's theories of motion. He measured the movement of a rolling ball across a surface, repeating the action again and again to verify his results. In his famous acceleration experiment, he showed that a uniform force produced a uniform acceleration. Through another experiment, he formulated the law of inertia. He found that rest was not the natural state of objects. Rather, an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by some external force. His discoveries proved Aristotelian physics wrong. Galileo then applied the experimental method to astronomy. On hearing about the invention of the telescope in Holland, Galileo made one for himself and trained it on the heavens. He discovered the first four moons of Jupiter, which clearly suggested that Jupiter could not possibly be embedded in any impenetrable crystal sphere as Aristotle and Ptolemy maintained. This discovery provided new evidence for the Copernican theory, in which Galileo already believed. Galileo then pointed his telescope at the moon. In 1597, when Johannes Kepler sent Galileo an early publication defending Copernicus, Galileo replied that it was too dangerous to express his support for heliocentrism publicly. The rising fervor of the Catholic Reformation increased the church's hostility to such radical ideas, and in 1616 the Holy Office placed the works of Copernicus and his supporters, including Kepler, on a list of books Catholics were forbidden to read. The accompanying decree declared that belief in a heliocentric world was "foolish and absurd, philosophically false and formally heretical."3 Galileo was a devout Catholic who sincerely believed that his theories did not detract from the perfection of God. Out of caution he silenced his beliefs for several years, until in 1623 he saw new hope with the ascension of Pope Urban VIII, a man sympathetic to developments in the new science. However, Galileo's 1632 Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World went too far. Published in Italian and widely read, this work openly lampooned the traditional views of Aristotle and Ptolemy and defended those of Copernicus. The papal Inquisition placed Galileo on trial for heresy. Imprisoned and threatened with torture, the aging Galileo recanted, "renouncing and cursing" his Copernican errors.

Origins of the Scientific Revolution - The beginning - The medieval university / Islam - The Renaissance - Developments in technology - Navigational stuff - Recent research - Magic

The Scientific Revolution drew on long-term developments in European culture/borrowings from Arabic scholars. The first important development was the medieval university. Permanent universities had been established to train the lawyers, doctors, and church leaders society required. Philosophy had taken its place alongside law, medicine, and theology. Medieval philosophers acquired an independence from theologians and a sense of free inquiry. Medieval universities drew on traditions of Islamic learning. With the expansion of Islam into the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim world inherited ancient Greek learning, which Islamic scholars added their own commentaries and new discoveries. Many Greek texts, including Aristotle, were lost to the West after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, re-entered through translation from the Arabic; these became the basis for the curriculum of the medieval universities. Leading universities established professorships of mathematics, astronomy, and optics within their faculties of philosophy. The prestige of the new fields was low, but the stage was set for the union of mathematics with natural philosophy that was to be a hallmark of the Scientific Revolution. The Renaissance stimulated scientific progress. Renaissance patrons played a role in funding scientific investigations. Renaissance artists' turn toward realism and their use of geometry to convey three-dimensional perspective encouraged scholars to practice close observation and to use mathematics to describe the natural world. The quest to restore the glories of the ancient past led to the rediscovery of more classical texts, such as Ptolemy's Geography. The encyclopedic treatise on botany by the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus was rediscovered, moldering on the shelves of the Vatican library. The fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453 resulted in a great influx of little-known Greek works, as Christian scholars fled to Italy with their precious texts. Developments in technology encouraged the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. The rise of printing provided a faster and less expensive way to circulate knowledge. Fascination with the new discoveries being made in Asia and the Americas increased the demand for printed material. Publishers found an eager audience for the books and images they issued about unknown peoples, plants, animals, and other new findings. The navigational problems of long sea voyages in the age of overseas expansion led to technological innovations. The king of Portugal appointed a commission of mathematicians to perfect tables to help seamen find their latitude. Navigation and cartography were critical in the development of many new scientific instruments. Better instruments enabled the rise of experimentation as a crucial method of the Scientific Revolution. Recent research on the contribution to the Scientific Revolution of practices that no longer belong to the realm of science, such as astrology. For most of human history, interest in astronomy was inspired by the belief that the changing relationships between planets and stars influence events on earth. This belief was held in Europe up to and during the Scientific Revolution. Many of the most celebrated astronomers were also astrologers and spent much time devising horoscopes for their patrons. Used as a diagnostic tool in medicine, astrology formed a regular part of the curriculum of medical schools. Practices of magic and alchemy remained important traditions for natural philosophers. The practitioners of magic strove to understand and control hidden connections they perceived among different elements of the natural world, such as that between a magnet and iron. The idea that objects possessed invisible or "occult" qualities that allowed them to affect other objects through their innate "sympathy" with each other was a particularly important legacy of the magical tradition. Belief in occult qualities was not antithetical to belief in God. On the contrary, adherents believed that only a divine creator could infuse the universe with such meaningful mystery.

Scientific Thought in 1500 - Natural philosophy - Ptolemy - Aristotle's views / elements - Aristotle's impact

One of the most important disciplines was natural philosophy, which focused on questions about the nature of the universe, its purpose, and how it functioned. Natural philosophy was based on the ideas of Aristotle. Medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas brought philosophy into harmony with Christian doctrines. According to Aristotelian view, a motionless earth was at the center of the universe and was encompassed by ten separate concentric crystal spheres that revolved around it. In the first eight spheres were embedded the moon, the sun, the five known planets, and the fixed stars. Then followed two spheres. Beyond the tenth sphere was Heaven, with the throne of God and the souls of the saved. Angels kept the spheres moving in perfect circles. Aristotle's cosmology made intellectual sense, but could not account for the observed motions of the stars and planets and provided no explanation for the backward motion of the planets. Ptolemy offered a solution to this dilemma: the planets moved in small circles, called epicycles, each of which moved in turn along a larger circle, or deferent. Ptolemaic astronomy was less elegant than Aristotle's neat nested circles and required complex calculations, but it provided a surprisingly accurate model for predicting planetary motion. Aristotle's views dominated thinking about physics and motion on earth. Aristotle distinguished between the world of the celestial spheres and that of the earth. The spheres consisted of a perfect, incorruptible quintessence. The sublunar world, was made up of four imperfect elements. The fire and air naturally moved upward, while the water and earth naturally moved downward. These natural directions of motion did not always prevail, for elements were mixed together and could be affected by an outside force. Aristotle also believed that a uniform force moved an object at a constant speed and that the object would stop as soon as that force was removed. Natural philosophy was considered superior to mathematical disciplines, and Aristotle's ideas about the cosmos were accepted for two thousand years. His views offered an explanation for what the eye actually saw. Aristotle's science as interpreted by Christian theologians fit with Christian doctrines. It established a home for God and a place for Christian souls. It put human beings at the center of the universe and made them the critical link in a "great chain of being" that stretched from the throne of God to the lowliest insect on earth. This approach to the natural world was thus a branch of theology, and it reinforced religious thought.

Medicine, the Body, and Chemistry - Inspiration for something - Important people - Robert Boyle

The Scientific Revolution inspired renewed study of the microcosm of the human body. For many centuries ancient Greek physician Galen's explanation of the body carried the same authority as Aristotle's account of the universe. According to Galen, the body contained four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Illness was believed to result from an imbalance of humors, which is why doctors frequently prescribed bloodletting to expel excess blood. Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus was an early proponent of the experimental method in medicine and pioneered the use of chemicals and drugs to address what he saw as chemical, rather than humoral, imbalances. Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius studied anatomy by dissecting human bodies, often those of executed criminals. In 1543, Vesalius issued his masterpiece, On the Structure of the Human Body. Its two hundred precise drawings revolutionized the understanding of human anatomy. The experimental approach also led English royal physician William Harvey to discover the circulation of blood through the veins and arteries in 1628. Harvey was the first to explain that the heart worked like a pump and to explain the function of its muscles and valves. Some decades later, Irishman Robert Boyle helped found the modern science of chemistry. Following Paracelsus's lead, he undertook experiments to discover the basic elements of nature, which he believed was composed of infinitely small atoms. Boyle was the first to create a vacuum, thus disproving Descartes's belief that a vacuum could not exist in nature, and he discovered Boyle's law, which states that the pressure of a gas varies inversely with volume.

The Copernican Hypothesis - Nicolaus Copernicus - Copernicus' hypothesis about the sun - The implications - Religious leaders response

The desire to explain and glorify God's handiwork led to the first departure from the medieval system. This was the work of the Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus was drawn to the vitality of the Italian Renaissance. He studied astronomy, medicine, and church law. Copernicus noted that astronomers depended on the work of Ptolemy for their calculations, but he felt that Ptolemy's rules detracted from the majesty of a perfect creator. He preferred an alternative ancient Greek idea: that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the universe. Copernicus theorized that the stars and planets, including the earth, revolved around a fixed sun. Desiring to be certain of his claims before revealing them to the world, Copernicus did not publish his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until after his death. The Copernican hypothesis had enormous scientific and religious implications, many of which Copernicus did not anticipate. First, it put the stars at rest and destroyed the main reason for believing in crystal spheres capable of moving the stars around the earth. Copernicus's theory suggested a universe of staggering size. If in the course of a year the earth moved around the sun and yet the stars appeared to remain in the same place, then the universe was unthinkably large. Third, by using mathematics to justify his theories, he challenged the traditional hierarchy of the disciplines. Finally, by characterizing the earth as just another planet, Copernicus destroyed the basic idea of Aristotelian physics — that the earthly sphere was quite different from the heavenly one. Where then were Heaven and the throne of God? Religious leaders varied in their response to Copernicus's theories. A few Protestant scholars became avid Copernicans, while others accepted some elements of his criticism of Ptolemy, but firmly rejected the notion that the earth moved, a doctrine that contradicted the literal reading of some passages of the Bible. Among Catholics, Copernicus's ideas drew little attention prior to 1600. Because the Catholic Church had never held to literal interpretations of the Bible, it did not officially declare the Copernican hypothesis false until 1616. Other events were almost as influential in creating doubts about traditional astronomy. In 1572 a new star appeared and shone very brightly for almost two years. The new star, which was actually a distant exploding star, made an enormous impression on people. It seemed to contradict the idea that the heavenly spheres were unchanging and therefore perfect. In 1577 a new comet suddenly moved through the sky, cutting a straight path across the supposedly impenetrable crystal spheres.

Newton's Synthesis - The foundation for Isaac Newton - History of Newton - The arrival of his ideas - Newton's return to physics - The key feature

The work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo had been largely accepted by the scientific community. The old astronomy and physics were in ruins, and several fundamental breakthroughs had been made. But the new findings failed to explain what forces controlled the movement of the planets and objects on earth. That challenge was taken up by English scientist Isaac Newton. Newton was born into the lower English gentry and enrolled at Cambridge University. Newton was an intensely devout, non-orthodox Christian, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Newton was fascinated by alchemy. He left behind thirty years' worth of encoded journals recording experiments to discover the elixir of life and a way to change base metals into gold and silver. He viewed alchemy as one path, alongside mathematics and astronomy, to the truth of God's creation. Like Kepler and other practitioners of the Scientific Revolution, he studied the natural world not for its own sake, but to understand the divine plan. Newton arrived at some of his most basic ideas about physics during a break from studies at Cambridge caused by an outbreak of plague. During this period he discovered his law of universal gravitation as well as the concepts of centripetal force and acceleration. Not realizing the significance of his findings, he did not publish them, and upon his return to Cambridge he took up the study of optics. Newton returned to physics and the preparation of his ideas for publication. The result appeared three years later in Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton's accomplishment was a single explanatory system that could integrate the astronomy of Copernicus, as corrected by Kepler's laws, with the physics of Galileo and his predecessors. Principia Mathematica laid down Newton's three laws of motion, using a set of mathematical laws that explain motion and mechanics. These laws of dynamics are complex, and it took scientists and engineers two hundred years to work out all their implications. The key feature of the Newtonian synthesis was the law of universal gravitation. According to this law, every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe in a precise mathematical relationship, whereby the force of attraction is proportional to the quantity of matter of the objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The whole universe — from Kepler's elliptical orbits to Galileo's rolling balls — was unified in one coherent system. The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton contested the invention of calculus, was outraged by Newton's claim that the "occult" force of gravity could allow bodies to affect one another at great distances. Newton's religious faith, as well as his alchemical belief in the innate powers of certain objects, allowed him to dismiss such criticism.