Scientific revolution
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- This article is about the period in history, not the process of scientific progress via revolution, proposed by Thomas Kuhn and discussed at Paradigm shift
Template:HistOfScience In the history of science, the scientific revolution was the period that roughly began with the discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, and others at the dawn of the 17th century, and ended with the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton. These boundaries are controversial, with some claiming that the proper start of the scientific revolution was the publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, while others wish to extend it into the 18th century, and yet others even deny its very existence.
The theory of the scientific revolution claims the seventeenth century was a period of major scientific changes. But at that time the word "science" did not have its current meaning, and "scientist" had not been coined; Newton was called a natural philosopher. Not only were there major theoretical and experimental developments, but even more importantly, the way in which scientists worked was radically changed. At the beginning of the century, science was highly Aristotelian; at its end, science was mechanical, and empirical.
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Emergence of the revolution
There is much scholarly debate as to the nature, emergence, and even the existence of the scientific revolution. This debate began with the work of Alexandre Koyré when he 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.
Since the time of Voltaire, many 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.
Early and medieval views of science
In the ancient world Greek had been the primary language of science. After the split of the Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek sharply decreased in western Europe, limiting access to all but the few scientific works that had been translated into Latin. Many ancient works were only known in the West through Latin encyclopedists. Much had to be gleaned from non-scientific sources: Roman surveying manuals were read for what geometry was included.<ref name=Grant>Template:Cite book</ref> By the 11th century, interest in scientific questions was growing, but much work from antiquity was still unavailable.
Key influences in this period include:
- Galen believed that there were four bodily humors--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile and believed that sickness was caused by an imbalance of any of the humors. His work in anatomy was widely known.
- Ptolemy's calculations of planetary motion. (This and Galen's anatomy, though largely superseded by later work, are none the less important contributions to science.) Ptolemy believed that the earth was the center of the universe.
- Aristotle's belief that God placed earth at the center of the universe with a hierarchical order to the Universe. The universe, according to Aristotle consisted of concentric spheres. All bodies naturally moved toward the center and moved toward rest, therefore a god must exist in order to move things into motion.
- Dante's view of the four elements: fire, earth, water, and air, which made up earth and purgatory.
Infusion of classical texts
In the 9th and 10th centuries, a mass of classical Greek texts were translated into Arabic, followed by a flurry of commentaries by Islamic thinkers. By the mid-10th century, further translation into Latin had begun in Northern Spain, and the recapture of Toledo and Sicily in the late 11th century allowed the translation to begin in earnest by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. Scholars came from around Europe to aid in translation. Gerard of Cremona is a good example of an Italian who came to Spain to copy a single text and stayed on to translate over a thousand works.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> His biography described how he came to Toledo, "There, 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." <ref name=Grant/>
In many instances, the late Greek and Arabic commentaries were more significant than the original work itself. Unsurprisingly, many found the translated ancient works obscure and confusing, and the commentaries aided in understanding the original text.
New scientific developments
About 1600, Ideas and People who emerged:
- Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) published De Humanis 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.
- Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543 argued for the heliocentric theory of the solar system.
- 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.
- William Gilbert (1544-1603) published On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on That Great Magnet the Earth in 1600.
- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion in 1609.
- 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.
- William Harvey (1578-1657) solved how blood circulates via dissections.
- 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.
- 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.
- René Descartes(1596-1650) pioneered deductive reasoning, publishing in 1637 Discourse on Method.
- Isaac Newton(1642-1727) built upon the work of Kepler and Galileo. His invention of 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 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.
Experimental developments
The development of telescopes in Holland and subsequent improvements by Galileo and others greatly expanded the accuracy and range of celestial observations. The emerging technology of the microscope brought the world of the very small within reach of the human observer, although it would take an additional two centuries before the instrument was perfected. Another notable invention was the air-pump, extensively used by Robert Boyle and others.
The Royal Society conducted regular sessions with experiments conducted by their Curator, Robert Hooke, who Newton described as "a curious and careful experimenter" (and who had also refined Boyle's air pump). Hooke's exactness of measurement and recording led to observations such as the inverse-square nature of gravity, partial pressures, and the new science of microscopy. Hooke was also able to quantify the resolving power of telescopes and show how the use of multi-lens eyepieces increased this by at least an order of magnitude.
Methodological developments
The most important changes were in the way that science was done. Two main developments can be identified as mechanisation, 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 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 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.
Some scholars (such as R. Hooykaas and Barbara Obrist) claim that the conception of the universe as an organic whole hindered experimental reproduction of natural mechanisms, because reproducible experiments were neither thinkable nor realizable. A similar objection is made today against holism and nonlocal physical interactions, because if the universe can interact nonlocally with experimental apparatus, the experiment is not truly under control.
Empiricism
"Look at the world, but don't experiment!"—such was the view of the natural philosophers before the scientific revolution. Nature, it was thought, should be looked at as it worked on its own. If one did an experiment, one was putting nature in "unnatural" circumstances, and hence the results of an experiment would not agree with the true way nature worked.
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 closely resembled ours in many ways -- much more so than the Aristotelian science of a century earlier.
Literary criticisms
A recent trend in literary theory, "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 special (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 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
<references/>
- Howard Margolis: It Started with Copernicus. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002 ISBN 0-07-138507-X
- Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0-266-75021-3
- This book suggests we re-examine and re-evaluate the mythology of 'The Scientific Revolution' to see if it was a cohesive or even real a historical event. The problem of the late 16th century to early 17th century was that while new methodologies were developed and used by a few, basic ideas remained relatively consistent - notably Newton reintroducing occult (hidden) forces (ie gravity) despite the want of a visibly mechanistic world system - while natural philosophers argued against others and amongst themselves over their legitimacy by using
- H. Floris Cohen The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographical Enquiry, University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN: 0226112802 This book provides an invaluable complete historiography of the idea that there was a scientific revolution, with extensive analyses of many different authors' various reasons that there was. However, arguably what it portrays at the end of the day is the dilution and degeneration of the thesis as a myth. Cohen's own view is that there was a scientific revolution because Newton's Principia was revolutionary. But he notably fails to prove it was in any respect, and that it was not an evolutionary development of previous theories such as Aristotelian dynamics, in spite of being a great scientific achievement.
- Sir Thomas Heath Mathematics in Aristotle ISBN: 1855065649 (This book scuppers the myth that Aristotelian science was non-mathematical.)bn:বৈজ্ঞানিক বিপ্লব
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