Introduction
Science is central to our world. People look to it to cure diseases, feed the hungry, and explore the wonder of the universe. They blame it for ecological collapse, racial, gender and regional inequalities, and spiritual emptiness.
Science and science-based industries employ millions of people. Scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have become folk heroes while the "mad scientist" is one of our culture's most characteristic villains. We expect science to constantly innovate and change, in both benevolent and terrifying ways.
But this hasn't always been true. Before the sixteenth century, theoretical science was practiced by few and had little cultural authority. Scientists commented on ancient texts as much as they performed direct observation or experimentation, and science was not particularly dynamic or progressive.
The central moment in establishing our own scientific culture is called the "Scientific Revolution," (although not all historians think that term is appropriate.) The revolution overthrew the authority of the ancient Greek natural philosophers, astronomers and physicians.
Astronomers moved from the earth-centered universe of Ptolemy and Aristotle to the vaster sun-centered universe of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. In physics, Aristotelianism was replaced by mathematical and mechanical Newtonianism.
Changes in other areas of the sciences were also of great importance. In medicine, the humoural medicine of the ancient Greek physician Galen was challenged by new anatomical discoveries, the most dramatic being William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. In botany and zoology, Europeans were flooded with new information from newly encountered areas of the world.
Like most revolutions, the Scientific Revolution drew on the resources of the past as much as it broke with them. Early modern scientists often presented themselves as restorers of past wisdom. The new science built on the old, on the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Arab astronomers and mathematicians, the Aristotelian professors of medieval Europe's universities and the humanist scholars of the Renaissance.
Rediscovery and recovery of ancient texts stimulated new thinking about the natural world. Early modern science drew on its own surroundings as well as past traditions.
The scientific revolutionaries themselves, for all their undoubted and awe-inspiring genius, were not abstract "great minds" standing outside their society and culture. Much of their ingenuity was devoted to practical problems like navigation and cartography.
Early modern science was also shaped by the political, religious and gendered positions of its makers. Like other revolutionaries, the makers of the scientific revolution quarreled fiercely among themselves, over everything from conflicting claims to priority in a discovery to the role of the Bible in scientific questions.
Not only the content but the practices of science changed during the Scientific Revolution. Scientific institutions spread across Europe, developing from temporary and informal groups into the permanent institutions founded in the 1660s, the English Royal Society and the French Royal Academy of Sciences. Periodicals, lectures and demonstrations brought news of the new science to a broad public. The world of Nicholas Copernicus, toiling in his lonely study and circulating manuscripts among a few peers, gave way to the far more familiar world of Edmond Halley, promoter, editor, civil servant, sea captain, and the scientist who established that comets follow recurring paths around the sun.
New scientific instruments like the telescope, microscope and air-pump found their way into the hands of more and more people. Experiments, which played only a very minor role in science before the scientific revolution, not only became essential to scientific work, but were presented to curious audiences as intellectual entertainment. The heroic narrative of the rise of the new astronomy and physics from Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543 to Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687 became one of the great legends of our culture, with its central scene the trial of Galileo Galilei in 1633.
Galileo and Newton, like a host of others, were exemplary figures, and the seventeenth century, the climax of the scientific revolution, was identified as the "century of genius."
Nor was this expansion of science's cultural presence restricted to Europe itself. The age of the scientific revolution was also the great age of European colonial expansion.
European science acquired a global reach, from India and Mexico in the sixteenth century to Brazil and Indonesia in the seventeenth. In China and Japan, the beginnings of the process by which western science overcame the other scientific traditions of the world were visible by 1700.
Like many revolutions, the scientific revolution laid the foundations for a new authority, that of science itself. Science became an ideological justification both for conserving and changing the social order. Thomas Hobbes sought to ground political sovereignty in the "mechanical philosophy," and political arithmeticians claimed to analyze human society quantitatively. Men used the latest scientific discoveries to support their power over women, and Europeans asserted on scientific grounds their superiorities over and right to rule the world's other peoples.
These potentials of science were not fully developed in the scientific revolution itself, but the potential was there.
These transformations in science–both its content and its cultural role–are the subject of this course. Chronologically, it covers the period from the remarkable generation whose contributions were made in the second quarter of the sixteenth century – the generation of Copernicus, Paracelsus, and Andreas Vesalius – to the establishment of Newtonian physics in England and the Netherlands in the early eighteenth century.
Lessons
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