Overview of the Scientific Revolution

1. The Scientific Revolution
1500-1700

2. History is not Stagnant
What will we know tomorrow?

3. Historians as “reverse engineers”
• Historians often look at
the finished product
and then work
backwards to find out
how did we get there.
– Interpretations vary
even among historians
• They do not all agree!

4. How do you feel?

5. Ancient Philosophers
• Socrates(469 b.c.e.-399 b.c.e.)
– Credited with Socratic method using
dialogue to arrive at truth
• Plato (424 b.c.e.- 327 b.c.e.)
– Student of Socrates and recorder of his
teachings
• Aristotle (384 b.c.e.- 322 b.c.e.)
– Student of Plato; teacher of Alexander
the Great; systemizer of knowledge in all
fields
• Claudius Ptolemy (90 c.e.-168 c.e.)
– Geocentric theory of the universe with
the universe as a set of nested spheres.

6. Revolution?
• Middle Ages
– 400 c.e.-1400 c.e.
• Renaissance
– 1300 c.e.-1600 c.e.
• Scientific Revolution
– 1500 c.e.-1700 c.e.
• Protestant Reformation
– 1517 c.e.-1648 c.e.
• Enlightenment
– 1680 c.e.-1800 c.e.

7. Middle Ages (400 c.e.-1400 c.e.)
• Ownership of the bible
was prohibited to
citizens. Only religious
leaders were qualified to
interpret and explain the
document. If “ordinary”
people owned and read
the bible who could
predict the consequences
to the order of society.

8. Johannes de Sacrobosco
Tractatus de Sphaera, 1230
• THE FOUR ELEMENTS. -- The machine of the universe is divided into two, the
ethereal and the elementary region. The elementary region, existing subject to
continual alteration, is divided into four there is earth, placed, as it were, as the
center in the middle of all, about which is water, about water air, about air
fire, which is pure and not turbid there and reaches to the sphere of the moon, as
Aristotle says in his book of Meteorology. For so God, the glorious and
sublime, disposed. And these are called the "four elements" which are in turn by
themselves altered, corrupted and regenerated. The elements are also simple
bodies which cannot be subdivided into parts of diverse forms and from whose
commixture are produced various species of generated things. Three of them, in
turn, surround the earth on all sides spherically, except in so far as the dry land
stays the sea's tide to protect the life of animate beings. All, too, are mobile except
earth, which, as the center of the world, by its weight in every direction equally
avoiding the great motion of the extremes, as a round body occupies the middle
of the sphere.

9. Zodiac and Planets Circling Earth
Sacrobosco, Sphaera Mundi

10. Renaissance (1300 c.e.-1600 c.e.)
• Renaissance humanism was an attempt to re-discover the
knowledge that had been held by the ancients who had
been closer to the time when God spoke to man. They
must have possessed advanced knowledge to construct
early civilizations, but that knowledge had disappeared
through time.
– "prisca sapientia" sacred wisdom
• If it’s new it can’t be true; If it’s old it’s good as gold
• A belief began to emerge that the church may have
“changed” knowledge over time to ensure and grow their
own authority and power.

11. Johannes Gutenberg 1398 c.e.-1468 c.e.
Moveable type printing press
• Wood block printing had been used in China by
700 c.e.
• With printing, suppression of ideas became more
difficult
• Ancient knowledge and the bible became more
available, but much of the early printing was
indulgences sold by the church for funding
• Indulgences were often prayers to recite
reducing years in purgatory- Remember
Martin Luther?

12. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
Address To The Nobility of the German Nation, 1520
• 25. The universities also require a good, sound reformation. I must say this, let it
vex whom it may. The fact is that whatever the papacy has ordered or instituted is
only designed for the propagation of sin and error. What are the universities, as at
present ordered, but, as the book of Maccabees says, "schools of 'Greek fashion'
and 'heathenish manners" (2 Macc. iv. 12, 13), full of dissolute living, where very
little is taught of the Holy Scriptures of the Christian faith, and the blind heathen
teacher, Aristotle, rules even further than Christ? Now, my advice would be that
the books of Aristotle, the Physics, the Metaphysics, Of the Soul, Ethics, which have
hitherto been considered the best, be altogether abolished, with all others that
profess to treat of nature, though nothing can be learned from them, either of
natural or of spiritual things. Besides, no one has been able to understand his
meaning, and much time has been wasted and many noble souls vexed with
much useless labour, study, and expense. I venture to say that any potter has more
knowledge of natural things than is to be found in these books. My heart is grieved
to see how many of the best Christians this accursed, proud, knavish heathen has
fooled and led astray with his false words. God sent him as a plague for our sins.

13. Scientific Revolution(1500 c.e.-1700 c.e.)
• Brought changes in math,
astronomy, medicine,
chemistry, engineering,
physics, botany, biology,
optics, shipbuilding,
navigation, etc.

14. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, 1543
• Began work as part of church
sponsored calendar reform.
• Was a proponent of the view of an
Earth in daily motion about its axis and
in yearly motion around a stationary
sun maintaining circular orbit. This
theory was rejected by the Catholic
church.
– Aristarchos of Samos presented the first
known heliocentric model of the solar
system around 230 b.c.e.

15. Tycho Brahe 1546-1601
De nova stella, 1573
• Brahe refuted the theory
of the celestial spheres by
showing the celestial
heavens were not in an
unchanging state of
perfection as previously
assumed by Aristotle and
Ptolemy.

16. Brahe for Fun
While studying at University of Rostock in
Germany in 1566, Tycho Brahe lost the bridge
of his nose in a duel against fellow Danish
nobleman, Manderup Parsbjerg. For the rest
of his life, Brahe wore a replacement made of
silver and gold, using a paste to keep it
attached.
When Tycho's tomb was opened in 1901
green marks were found on his skull,
suggesting copper. Historians have speculated
that he wore a number of different
prosthetics for different occasions, noting that
a copper nose would have been more
comfortable and less heavy than a precious
metal one.

17. Brahe for Fun
• Tycho was said to own one percent of the entire wealth
of Denmark at one point in the 1580’s, and he often
held large social gatherings in his castle. He kept a
dwarf named Jepp (whom Tycho believed to be
clairvoyant) as a court jester who sat under the table
during dinner.
• Tycho also had a tame elk ( or moose). The animal died
on a visit to entertain a nobleman. Apparently during
dinner the elk had drunk a lot of beer, fallen down the
stairs, and died.
• Tycho suddenly contracted a bladder or kidney ailment
after attending a banquet in Prague, and died eleven
days later in 1601. According to Kepler's account, Brahe
had refused to leave the banquet to relieve himself
because it would have been a breach of etiquette.
– Recent investigations have suggested that Brahe died
from mercury poisoning—extremely toxic levels of it
have been found in hairs from his moustache.

18. Johannes Kepler (1571 c.e. -1630 c.e.)
Astronomia nova, 1609
• Kepler had been an assistant
and student of Brahe.
• Argued for heliocentric
movement of the planets,
including their elliptical path
and movement of free floating
bodies as opposed to objects on
rotating spheres.

19. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 1615
• The reason produced for condemning the opinion that the earth moves and the sun stands
still in many places in the Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still.
Since the Bible cannot err; it follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes a
erroneous and heretical position who maintains that the sun is inherently motionless and
the earth movable.
• With regard to this argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent
to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is
understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say
things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the
Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one
might; fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be
made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary
to assign to God feet, hands and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as
anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of` things past and ignorance
of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that
manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the
common people, who are rude and unlearned.

20. Rene Descartes (1596–1650)
Discourse on the Method, 1637
• Descartes revived the Socratic
method and took skepticism to
the radical extreme.
– Skepticism argues it is impossible
to know anything. Descarte
established the extreme with his
philosophical statement cogito
ergo sum- “I think, therefore I
am.”