The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 2: Columbus and Copernicus

This lesson deals with the changes to the scientific world-view caused by the European discovery of the Americas and Copernicus's theory that the earth revolved around the sun.

Introduction

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a time of dramatic developments in European science and European awareness of the world. The two most important scientific developments contrast immensely. The growth of European knowledge of the world outside Europe involved kings, queens, armies, fleets, battles, expeditions, massacres, and vast expenditures.

It also involved many scientists and physicians, eager to acquire and exploit the potential for new knowledge presented by newly found lands. The other important development played out for most of this period in the mind of a single man, a Polish priest and astronomer who spent most of his career far from the capitals of European culture. He is known by the Latin version of his name as Copernicus.

Despite their differences, the intellectual revolutions associated with Columbus and Copernicus had much in common. Both revolutions psychologically displaced Europeans from the center of the cosmos; Columbus and other explorers by expanding the world as it was known to include entire new continents and peoples, and Copernicus by suggesting that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe. Both also pointed out the inadequacy of ancient knowledge.

The ancients, as all agreed, had known nothing of America, and their knowledge even of the rest of the world outside Europe and the closer parts of Asia and Africa was open to question. Aristotle’s contention that the earth near the equator would be too hot for human habitation was dramatically disproved. Although Copernicus drew on ancient astronomers and philosophers for his theory that the planets went around the sun rather than the earth, his work was as revolutionary as that of the explorers. Displacing the earth from the center of the cosmos not only challenged the whole tradition of astronomy that went back to the ancient Ptolemy, it also challenged the whole system of physics that went back to Aristotle.

First establishing the truth of Copernicus’s views, then modifying them to better suit observed phenomena, and then working out the full implications of Copernicus’s universe would absorb the energies of some of Europe’s most creative scientists over the next 150 years, until the publication of Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.