Scientific Revolution

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

The event which most historians of science call the scientific revolution can be dated roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius published his De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body). As with many historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about its boundaries, some seeing elements contributing to the revolution as early as the 14th century and finding its last stages in chemistry and biology in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is general agreement, however, that the intervening period saw a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas in physics, astronomy and biology, in institutions supporting scientific investigation, and in the more widely held picture of the universe.

Significance of the "revolution"

Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim there was a change in world view that was revolutionary. In 1611 the English poet, John Donne, wrote:

[The] new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit

Can well direct him where to look for it....

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

The 20th 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.... [I]t 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.

A single change does not make a revolution. Among the new ideas which Donne and Butterfield saw as revolutionary were

• the replacement of the Earth by the Sun as the center of the universe,
• the challenge to the Aristotelian theory that matter was continuous and made up of the elements Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Aether by rival ideas that matter was atomistic or corpuscular or that its chemical composition was even more complex,
• the replacement of the Aristotelian idea that by their nature, heavy bodies moved straight down toward their natural places; that by their nature, light bodies moved naturally straight up toward their natural place; and that by their nature, aethereal bodies moved in unchanging circular motions by the idea that all bodies are heavy and move according to the same physical laws,
• the replacement of the Aristotelian concept that all motions require the continued action of a cause by the inertial concept that motion is a state that, once started, continues indefinetely without the need for any further action of a cause, and
• the replacement of the Galenic treatment of the venous and arterial systems as two separate systems with Harvey's concept that Blood circulated from the arteries to the veins "impelled in a circle, and is in a state of ceaseless motion".

However, many of the important figures of the scientific revolution shared in the Renaissance respect for ancient learning and cited ancient pedigrees for their innovations. Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton all traced different ancient and medieval ancestries for the heliocentric system. While preparing a revised edtion of his Principia, Newton attributed his law of gravity and his first law of motion to a range of historical figures. A few modern historians have agreed with Newton that Aristotle anticipated his first law of motion, whereby it follows that the principle of the continuation of unresisted and externally unforced motion would not be a product of the scientific revolution.

Many historians of science have seen other ancient and medieval antecedents of these ideas. It is widely accepted that Copernicus's De revolutionibus followed the outline and method set by Ptolemy in his Almagest and that Galileo's mathematical treatment of acceleration and his concept of impetus grew out of earlier medieval analyses of motion.

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 such as Benedetti, Galileo, Kepler and others.

Ancient and Medieval background

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Greek was the primary language of science. After the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek sharply decreased in western Europe, limiting direct access to all but the few scientific works that had been translated into Latin. Many ancient ideas were only known in the West through Latin encyclopedists; other fragments of ancient science were preserved or assumed in a range of practical and religious texts. By the 13th century, interest in scientific questions had become well established, as the writings of antiquity became increasingly available in Latin translations, made either from Arabic of directly from the Greek. One of the more important translators was Gerard of Cremona (ca. 1114 - 1187) who travelled to Toledo, where "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." These difficult new texts were first assimilated in Western Europe against the background provided by the traditions of early medieval science, with the assistance of late Greek and Arabic commentaries, most notably those of the Spanish Muslim, Averroes (1126-98). These texts and their commentaries were taught and studied, interpreted and criticized within the institutional structure of the Medieval universities.

Key ideas from this period, which would be transformed fundamentally during the scientific revolution, include:

• Aristotle's cosmology which placed the Earth at the center of a spherical cosmos, with a hierarchical order to the Universe. The terrestrial and celestial regions were made up of different elements which had different kinds of natural movement.
  • The terrestrial region, according to Aristotle consisted of concentric spheres of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. All bodies naturally moved in straight lines until they reached the appropriate sphere, which was their natural place at the center. All other terrestrial motions were non-natural, or violent, and required the continued action of an external cause.
  • The celestial region was made up of the fifth element, Aether, which was unchanging and moved naturally with unending circular motion.

• Ptolemy's geometrical model of planetary motion. Ptolemy's Almagest demonstrated that geometrical calculations could compute the exact positions of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets in the future and in the past, and showed how these computational models were derived from astronomical observations. As such they formed the model for later astronomical developments.

• Galen's physiological system which located three vital functions in the brain, the center of the nervous system which disseminates a subtle psychical spirit responsible for sensation; in the heart, the center of the arterial system which disseminates arterial blood, bearing a vital spirit responsible for life; and in the liver, the center of the venous system which disseminates the thick venous blood, bearing a natural spirit responsible for growth and nourishment. He also adopted the traditional Greek view that illness was the result of imbalance among four bodily humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Health could be restored by diet, by bleeding or purging, or by medication to restore the proper balance.

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? Is sucky.

New scientific developments

About 1600, Ideas and People who emerged:

• Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543 argued for the heliocentric theory of the solar system.
• Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) (1543), which discredited Galen's views. He found that the circulation of blood resolved from pumping of the heart. He also assembled the first human skeleton from cutting open cadavers.
• William Gilbert (1544-1603) published On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on That Great Magnet the Earth in 1600.
• Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) made extensive and more accurate naked eye observations of the planets in the late 1500's which became the basic data for Kepler's studies.
• Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose greatest scientific experiment amounted to stuffing snow into a dead chicken, nevertheless penned inductive reasoning, proceeding from observation and experimentation.
• Galileo (1564-1642) improved the telescope and made several astonishing (for the time) astronomical observations such as the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, which he published in 1610. He developed the laws for falling bodies based on pioneering quantitative experiments which he analyzed mathematically.
• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion in 1609.
• William Harvey (1578-1657) demonstrated that blood circulates via dissections and various other experimental techniques.
• René Descartes (1596-1650) pioneered deductive reasoning, publishing in 1637 Discourse on Method.
• Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) constructed powerful single lens microscopes and made extensive observations that he published in about 1660 began to open up the micro-world of biology.
• Isaac Newton (1642-1727) built upon the work of Kepler and Galileo. His development of the calculus opened up new applications of the methods of mathematics to science. He showed that an inverse square law for gravity explained the elliptical orbits of the planets, and advanced the theory of Universal Gravitation. Newton believed that scientific theory should be coupled with rigid experimentation.

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 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, 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.

Methodological developments

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.

The "mechanical philosophy" tried to put a stop to this. The mechanists, of whom the most important was René Descartes, rejected all goals, emotion and intelligence in nature. In this modern view, the world consisted of matter moving in accordance with the laws of physics. Where nature had previously been imagined to be like a living entity, the scientific revolution viewed nature as following natural, physical laws. Mechanical philosophy is frequently described as envisioning a clockwork universe, as clockwork was growing increasingly refined at the time. In the view of many, the universe could be envisioned as giant intermeshing mechanical gears or vortices, as in a clock.

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 – 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.

Postmodern critiques

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 Philosophical 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.

References

• Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographical Enquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-11280-2
• Hall, A. Rupert (Alfred Rupert, 1920- ). The revolution in science, 1500-1750. 3rd ed. London ; New York : Longman, 1983. viii, 373 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0582491339 (pbk.) Review
• Heath, Sir Thomas. Mathematics in Aristotle ISBN 1-85506-564-9
• Lindberg, David C. and Robert S. Westman, eds. Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-34804-8
• Margolis, Howard. It Started with Copernicus. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002  ISBN 0-07-138507-X
• Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN 0-226-75021-3 Review

See also

• Merton Thesis