4.2 The Scientific Revolution

scientific thinking prior to the scientific revolution

• the Earth is the center of the universe

• ¼ of the human body is made of phlegm (mucus)

who came up with most of the accepted knowledge of the natural world prior to the scientific revolution? + who agreed with them

Aristotle from ancient Greece + the church agreed with their views because it goes with what the Bible says (astronomically and about the human body)

causes of the scientific revolution

• establishment of universities —> based on greek scholarships which became the curriculum’s foundation because of Islamic scholars who preserved the works of Aristotle

• renaissance —> the wealthy patronized studies into the natural world (because of the renaissance’s emphasis in realism)

• the printing press —> easier and faster to circulate findings about the natural world with great speed to a wide readership

natural philosophy

the study of the natural world

Geocentric model

a model that was agreed upon by many great thinkers that the Earth was fixed, immovable, and at the center of the universe

Ptolemy

a great thinker who agreed with Aristotle about the Geocentric model of the universe

Heliocentric model

a model, created by Nicolaus Copernicus, states that the sun was at the center while Earth and all other planets revolve around it. also that the Earth rotates on an axis

Nicolaus Copernicus

an astronomer that did lots of math and challenged the geocentric model of the universe and then put forth the heliocentric model of the universe

Johannes Kepler + his laws of planetary motion

an astronomer that built upon Copernicus’s work. he also did math and agreed with the heliocentric model AND

established some laws of planetary motion:

1. planets orbit the sun not in perfect circles, but rather in ellipses

2. planets move faster when closer to the sun and slower when farther away

3. time a planet takes to orbit the sun is exactly related to its distance from the sun

Galileo

an astronomer that didn’t use math but used his eyes, built a new telescope (didn’t invent but created his own) which allowed human eyes to see farther up into space —> observed the detail of moons.

why were these astronomical scientists important

their ideas were crucial in overturning the accepted truths about the universe (basically they’re disproving the Aristotelian views that the Bible agreed with)

—> challenging established philosophical authority, these scientists were challenging scriptural authority (church)

Church’s response to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo

they ended up on the Church’s index of prohibited books and Galileo was even tried for Heresy

when did the heliocentric model (and other contributions of Kepler & Galileo) become widely accepted

by the 1640s

Issac Newton

explained the force that held the bodies in the universe together

by the end of the 16th century, Newton was able to combine the physics of Galileo with the mathematical computations of Kepler and Copernicus to produce the Law of Universal Gravitation (basically explained Gravity)

Galen

Ancient Greek who created theories about the human body (basically the Aristotle of the human body).

he created the Humoral theory of the body which said that the body was composed of four kinds of substances: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm and that when these 4 substances were in balance, the human body was healthy but when they weren’t balanced, it caused sickness and diseases —> he used bloodletting to cure patients

he also thought that there were two different systems of blood in the system which didn’t interact with one another

Paracelsus

a Swiss physician who rejected the humoral theory of diseases but claimed it was chemical imbalances that caused the diseases —> you need chemical remedies

Andreas Vesalius

he many dissected dead bodies which revolutionized the study of anatomy and published his findings in a book which overturned Galen’s ideas

William Harvey

determined that the circulatory system was one integrated whole (blood is pumped out of the heart and through the body back to the heart and the cycle keeps on repeating)

Empiricism

the pursuit of knowledge through inductive reasoning (understanding the world first by observing the smallest parts of it and then generalizing those findings to the largest parts)

Francis Bacon

emphasized Empiricism —> INDUCTIVE REASONING —> observing small then to big parts of the Earth

he was one of the major players to challenge the dominance of ancient greek philosophy

Rene Descartes

developed a system of deductive reasoning

he figured it was necessary to doubt everything that could reasonably be doubted, and once you ran into something that was undoubtable, then you could build your reasoning on that first principle (BIG IDEAS then SMALL IDEAS)

• he came up with this because without astronomy we use our human eyes and think that the Earth is the center because it looks like we are still while the rest of the universe is moving but thats a small detail which isn’t true so it’s important to use big —> small)

continuity

older beliefs still existed —> some pathfinders of the new science still held onto beliefs in alchemy which was the attempt to turn base metals into gold and silver, and astrology which taught that the positions of planets and starts affected the outcome of human life