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The event which many for the contrary view.) SIGNIFICANCE OF THE REVOLUTION Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim that there was a revolutionary change in world view. In 1611 the English poet, John Donne , wrote:
The mid-twentieth century historian, Herbert Butterfield, was less disconcerted but saw the change as equally fundamental. "Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world — since it ended 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.... {Link without Title} 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'', p. viii More recently, sociologist and historian of science Steven Shapin opened his book, ''The Scientific Revolution,'' with the paradoxical statement: "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it."Steven Shapin, ''The Scientific Revolution'', (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1996), p. 1. Although historians of science continue to debate the exact meaning of the term, and even its validity, the Scientific Revolution still remains a useful concept to interpret the many changes in science. A single change does not make a revolution. Among the new ideas which are seen to be revolutionary are:
( Cf. Abel B. Franco (October 2003). "Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory", ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' 64 (4), p. 521-546 respectively, while the concept of Reaction foreshadowing Newton's Third Law Of Motion was discovered by Ibn Bajjah (Avempace). Shlomo Pines (1964), "La dynamique d’Ibn Bajja", in ''Mélanges Alexandre Koyré'', I, 442-468 [462, 468 , Paris. ( Cf. Abel B. Franco (October 2003). "Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory", ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' 64 (4), p. 521-546 {Link without Title} .) Many historians of science have seen other ancient and medieval antecedents of these ideas.A survey of the debate over the significance of these antecedents is in . Human Blood Circulation and Pulmonary Circulation were also first described by Ibn Al-Nafis several centuries before the scientific revolution.S. A. Al-Dabbagh (1978). "Ibn Al-Nafis and the pulmonary circulation", '' The Lancet '' 1, p. 1148. The standard theory of the history of the scientific revolution claims the seventeenth century was a period of revolutionary scientific changes. It is claimed that not only were there revolutionary 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 anti-revolutionist 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 scientists such as Ibn Al-Haytham , Benedetti , Galileo Galilei , or Johannes Kepler . ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND The scientific revolution built upon the foundation of " was still the dominant intellectual framework in 16th and 17th century Europe. , ''Theoricae novae planetarum'', 1474.]] Key ideas from this period, which would be transformed fundamentally during the scientific revolution, include:
NEW APPROACHES TO NATURE Historians of the Scientific Revolution traditionally maintain that its most important changes were in the way in which scientific investigation was conducted, as well as the philosophy underlying scientific developments. Among the main changes are the Mechanical Philosophy , the Chemical Philosophy , Empiricism , and the increasing role of mathematics.An introduction to the influence of the mechanical and chemical philosophies and of mathematization appears in Richard S. Westfall, ''Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton,'' (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1980), pp. 1-39. The mechanical philosophy Aristotle recognized four kinds of causes, of which the most important was the "final cause". The final cause was the aim, goal, or purpose 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. The rise of the so-called "mechanical philosophy" put a stop to this. The mechanists, of whom the most important one was René Descartes , rejected all goals, emotion and intelligence in nature. In this view the world consisted of particles of matter -- which lacked all active powers and were fundamentally inert -- with motion being caused by direct physical contact. Where nature had previously been imagined to be like an active entity, the mechanical philosophers viewed nature as following natural, physical laws.Richard S. Westfall, ''The Construction of Modern Science'', (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971), pp. 30-33. The chemical philosophy Chemistry, and its cousin alchemy, became an increasingly important aspect of scientific thought in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The importance of chemistry is indicated by the range of important scholars who actively engaged in chemical research. Among them were the astronomer Tycho Brahe Owen Hannaway, "Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe," ''Isis'' 77(1986): 585-610, the chemical physician Paracelsus, and the English philosophers Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Unlike the mechanical philosophy, the chemical philosophy stressed the active powers of matter, which alchemists frequently expressed in terms of vital or active principles – of spirits operating in nature.Richard S. Westfall, ''Never at Rest,'' pp. 18-23. 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 scientists and philosophers like like Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhacen) and Francis Bacon , an empirical tradition was developed by the 16th century. The Aristotelian belief of natural and artificial circumstances was abandoned, and a research tradition of systematic Experiment ation was slowly accepted throughout the scientific community. Bacon's philosophy of using an Inductive approach to nature – to abandon assumption and to attempt to simply observe with an open mind – 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 needed—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 ways—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. Mathematisation In the Middle Ages mathematics was held to produce an inferior form of knowledge; mathematics could only describe, and sometimes predict, observed phenomena. Scientific knowledge, according to the Aristotelians, was concerned with establishing true and necessary causes of things.Peter Dear, ''Revolutionizing the Sciences,'' pp 65-7, 134-8. To the extent that medieval natural philosophers used mathematical techniques, they limited mathematics to theoretical analyses of local motion and other aspects of change.Edward Grant, ''The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages,'' pp. 101-3, 148-50 The actual measurement of a physical quantity, and the comparison of that measurement to a value computed on the basis of theory, was largely limited to the mathematical disciplines of and Physiology ).Katharine Park (March 1990). "''Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500'' by Nancy G. Siraisi", ''The Journal of Modern History'' 62 (1), p. 169-170. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European scientists began increasingly applying quantitative measurements to the measurement of physical phenomena on the Earth. Galileo maintained strongly that mathematics provided a kind of necessary certainty that could be compared to God's: "with regard to those few propositions which the human intellect does understand, I believe its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty."Galileo Galilei, ''Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,'' trans. Stillman Drake, 2nd. ed., (Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr., 1967), p. 103 EMERGENCE OF THE REVOLUTION 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. Alexandre Koyré coined the term and definition of 'The Scientific Revolution' in 1939, which later influenced the work of traditional Historians A. Rupert Hall and J.D. Bernal and subsequent Historiography on the subject (Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 1996). To some extent, this arises from different conceptions of what the revolution was; some of the rancor and cross-purposes in such debates may arise from lack of recognition of these fundamental differences. But it also and more crucially arises from disagreements over the historical facts about different theories and their logical analysis, e.g. Did Aristotle's dynamics deny the principle of inertia or not? Did science become mechanistic? SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTS Key ideas and people that emerged from the 16th and 17th centuries:
THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS 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 Roman 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. Furthermore, the centripetal force exerted by a spinning body--especially one that would have to rotate as quickly as the Earth must, given that in the 16th century, the size of the planet and the length of a day were well and accurately known--would fling objects from its surface. It would take Newton's developments on inertia and gravity to set these objections to rest, respectively. 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. 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 Formula e. Not only Astronomy and Mechanics were greatly changed. Optics , for instance, was revolutionized by people like Robert Hooke , Christiaan Huygens , René Descartes 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. CONTRARY VIEWS See Also: Continuity thesis Not all historians of science are agreed that there was any revolution in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. For a contrary view, see the article: Continuity Thesis . Another contrary view has been recently proposed by Arun Bala in his Dialogical history of the birth of modern science. Bala argues that the changes involved in the Scientific Revolution – the Mathematical Realist turn, the Mechanical Philosophy , the Corpuscular (atomic) Philosophy , the central role assigned to the Sun in Copernican Heliocentrism - have to be seen as rooted in Multicultural influences on Europe. Islamic Science gave the first exemplar of a mathematical realist theory with Alhazen 's '' Book Of Optics '' in which physical light rays traveled along mathematical straight lines. The swift transfer of Chinese Mechanical Technologies in the medieval era shifted European sensibilities to perceive the world in the image of a Machine . The Indian Number System , which developed in close association with Atomism in India, carried implicitly a new mode of mathematical atomic thinking. And the Heliocentric Theory which assigned central status to the sun, as well as Newton’s concept of Force acting at a distance, were rooted in ancient Egyptian religious ideas associated with Hermeticism . Bala argues that by ignoring such Multicultural impacts we have been led to a Eurocentric conception of the Scientific Revolution.Bala, 2006 SEE ALSO
Revolutions
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