Background to the Scientific Revolution

• To say that the Scientific Revolution brought about a dissolution of the medieval worldview is not to say that the Middle Ages was a period of scientific ignorance.

• Many ''natural philosophers,'' as medieval scientists were called, preferred refined logical analysis to systematic observations of the natural world.

• Ancient Authors and Renaissance Artists Whereas medieval scholars had made use of Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy in Latin translations to develop many of their positions in the fields of physics, medicine, and astronomy, the Renaissance humanists had mastered Greek and made available new works of Galen, Ptolemy, and Archimedes as well as Plato and the presocratics.

• Renaissance artists have also been credited with making an impact on scientific study.

• Leonardo da Vinci devised ''war machines,'' and Albrecht Du ̈rer made designs for the fortifications of cities.

• The relationship between technology and the Scientific Revolution was not a simple one, however, for many technological experts did not believe in abstract or academic learning.

• Indeed, many of the technical innovations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were accomplished outside the universities by people who emphasized practical rather than theoretical knowledge.

• In any case, the invention of new instruments and machines, such as the telescope and the microscope, often made new scientific discoveries possible.

• The printing press had an indirect but crucial role in spreading innovative ideas quickly and easily.

• Mathematics, so fundamental to the scientific achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was promoted in the Renaissance by the rediscovery of the works of ancient mathematicians and the influence of Plato, who had emphasized the importance of mathematics in explaining the universe.

• Applauded as the key to navigation, military science, and geography, mathematics was also regarded as the key to understanding the nature of things.

• Renaissance Magic Another factor in the origins of the Scientific Revolution may have been magic.

• By the end of the sixteenth century, Hermetic magic had become fused with alchemical thought into a single intellectual framework.

• Was it Hermeticism, then, that inaugurated the shift in consciousness that made the Scientific Revolution possible, since the desire to control and dominate the natural world was a crucial motivating force in the Scientific Revolution?

• ''5 Scholars debate the issue, but histories of the Scientific Revolution frequently overlook the fact that the great names we associate with the revolution in cosmology, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, all had a serious interest in Hermetic ideas and the fields of astrology and alchemy.

Toward a New Heaven: A Revolution in Astronomy

• The cosmological views of the Later Middle Ages had been built on a synthesis of the ideas of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Christian theology.

• This Christianized Ptolemaic universe, then, was finite.

• God and the saved souls were at one end of the universe, and humans were at the center.

• They proposed, for example, that the planetary bodies traveled on epicycles, concentric spheres within spheres, that would enable the paths of the planets to correspond more precisely to observations while adhering to Aristotle's ideas of circular planetary movement.

• Copernicus

  • Before he left Italy in 1506, he had become aware of ancient views that contradicted the Ptolemaic, earth-centered conception of the universe.

  • Copernicus argued that the universe consisted of eight spheres with the sun motionless at the center and the sphere of the fixed stars at rest in the eighth sphere.

  • Moreover, according to Copernicus, what appeared to be the movement of the sun and the fixed stars around the earth was really explained by the daily rotation of the earth on its axis and the journey of the earth around the sun each year.

  • He did not reject Aristotle's principle of the existence of heavenly spheres moving in circular orbits.

  • Nevertheless, the shift from an earth-centered to a sun-centered system was significant and raised serious questions about Aristotle's astronomy and physics despite Copernicus's own adherence to Aristotle.

• Brahe

  • A Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe was granted possession of an island near Copenhagen by King Frederick II.

  • This body of data led him to reject the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system, but at the same time he was unable to accept Copernicus's suggestion that the earth actually moved.

  • While he was in Prague, Brahe took on an assistant by the name of Johannes Kepler.

• Kepler

  • Johannes Kepler had been destined by his parents for a career as a Lutheran minis- ter.

  • He abandoned theology and became a teacher of mathematics and astronomy at Graz in Austria.

  • Kepler's work illustrates well the narrow line that often separated magic and science in the early Scientific Revolution.

  • These laws may have confirmed Kepler's interest in the music of the spheres, but more importantly, they confirmed Copernicus's heliocentric theory while modifying it in some ways.

  • Kepler published his first two laws of planetary motion in 1609.

  • Although at Tu ̈bingen he had accepted Copernicus's heliocentric ideas, in his first law he rejected Copernicus by showing that the orbits of the planets around the sun were not circular but elliptical, with the sun at one focus of the ellipse rather than at the center.

  • Published ten years later, Kepler's third law established that the square of a planet's period of revolution is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun.

  • Kepler's three laws effectively eliminated the idea of uni- form circular motion as well as the idea of crystalline spheres revolving in circular orbits.

• Galileo

  • Galileo was the first European to make systematic observations of the heavens by means of a telescope, thereby inaugurating a new age in astronomy.

  • Instead of peering at terrestrial objects, Galileo turned his telescope to the skies and made a remarkable series of discoveries: mountains and craters on the moon, four moons revolving around Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and sunspots.

  • But even in the midst of his newfound acclaim, Galileo found himself increasingly suspect by the authorities of the Catholic Church.

  • In The Starry Messenger, Galileo had revealed himself as a firm proponent of Copernicus's heliocentric system.

  • The Roman Inquisition of the Catholic Church condemned Copernicanism and ordered Galileo to reject the Copernican thesis.

  • As one cardinal commented, ''The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us not how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven.''

  • Galileo was told, however, that he could continue to discuss Copernicanism as long as he maintained that it was not a fact but a mathematical supposition.

  • Galileo, however, never really accepted his condemnation.

  • In 1632, he published his most famous work, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican.

  • Galileo was dragged once more before the Inquisition in 1633, found guilty of teaching the condemned Copernican system, and forced to recant his errors.

  • Placed under house arrest on his estate near Florence, he spent the remaining eight years of his life studying mechanics, a field in which he made significant contributions.

  • Moreover, Galileo discovered the principle of inertia when he argued that a body in motion continues in motion forever unless deflected by an external force.

  • Thus, a state of uniform motion is just as natural as a state of rest.

• Newton

  • Born in the English village of Woolsthorpe in 1642, Isaac Newton was an unremarkable young man until he attended Cambridge University.

  • 'During this period, he invented calculus, a mathematical means of calculating rates of change; began his investigations into the composition of light; and inaugurated his work on the law of universal gravitation.

  • Made president of the Royal Society in 1703 and knighted in 1705 for his great achievements, Sir Isaac Newton is to this day the only English scientist to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

  • He left behind hundreds of manuscript pages of his studies of alchemy, and in fact, his alchemical experiments were a major feature of his life until he moved to London in 1696 to become warden of the royal mint.

  • Although Newton may have considered himself a representative of the Hermetic tradition, he chose, it has been recently argued, for both political and psychological reasons to repress that part of his being, and it is as the ''symbol of Western science'' that he came to be viewed.

  • In this work, the last highly influential book in Europe to be written in Latin, Newton spelled out the mathematical proofs demonstrating his universal law of gravitation.

  • In book 3, Newton applied his theories of mechanics to the problems of astronomy by demonstrating that these three laws of motion govern the planetary bodies as well as terrestrial objects.

  • Integral to his whole argument was the universal law of gravitation, which explained why the planetary bodies did not go off in straight lines but continued in elliptical orbits about the sun.

  • Newton's world-machine, conceived as operating absolutely in time, space, and motion, dominated the Western worldview until the twentieth century, when the Einsteinian revolution, based on the concept of relativity, superseded the Newtonian mechanistic concept.

  • Natural philosophers on the Continent resisted Newton's ideas, and it took much of the eighteenth century before they were generally accepted everywhere in Europe.

Advances in Medicine and Chemistry

• Late medieval medicine was dominated not by the teachings of Aristotle but by those of the Greek physician Galen, who had lived in the second century C.E. Galen's influence on the medieval medical world was pervasive in anatomy, physiology, and disease.

• Treatment of disease was highly influenced by Galen's doctrine of four bodily humors: blood, considered warm and moist; yellow bile, warm and dry; phlegm, cold and moist; and black bile, cold and dry.

• Paracelcus

  • Philippus Aureolus von Hohenheim, who renamed himself Paracelsus, traveled widely and may have been awarded a medical degree from the University of Ferrara in Italy.

  • ''12 In accordance with the macrocosmic-microcosmic principle, Paracelsus believed that the chemical reactions of the universe as a whole were reproduced in human beings on a smaller scale.

  • Paracelsus had turned against the Galenic principle that ''contraries cure'' in favor of the ancient Germanic folk principle that ''like cures like.''

  • Later generations came to regard Paracelsus more favorably, and historians who have stressed Paracelsus's concept of disease and recognition of ''new drugs'' for medicine have viewed him as a father of modern medicine.

  • Others have argued that his microcosmic philosophy and use of ''like cures like'' drugs make him the forerunner of both homeopathy and the holistic medicine of the postmodern era.

• Vesalius

  • The new anatomy of the sixteenth century was the work of Andreas Vesalius.

  • Vesalius's hands-on approach to teaching anatomy enabled him to rectify some of Galen's most glaring errors.

• Harvey

  • Harvey demonstrated that the heart and not the liver was the beginning point of the circulation of blood in the body, that the same blood flows in both veins and arteries, and most importantly, that the blood makes a complete circuit as it passes through the body.

  • Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood laid the foundation for modern physiology.

• Robert Boyle was one of the first scientists to conduct controlled experiments.

• Boyle also rejected the medieval belief that all matter consisted of the same components in favor of the view that matter is composed of atoms, which he called ''little particles of all shapes and sizes'' and which would later be known as the chemical elements.

• In the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier invented a system of naming the chemical elements, much of which is still used today.

• Marie-Anne Lavoisier is a reminder that women too played a role in the Scientific Revolution.

Women in the Origins of Modern Science

• But in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, new opportunities for elite women emerged as enthusiasm for the new secular learning called humanism led Europe's privileged and learned men to encourage women to read and study Classical and Christian texts.

• The ideal of a humanist education for some of the daughters of Europe's elite persisted into the seventeenth century, but only for some privileged women.

• Margaret Cavendish

  • Much as they were drawn to humanism, women were also attracted to the Scientific Revolution.

  • Unlike females educated formally in humanist schools, women interested in science had to obtain a largely informal education.

  • One of the most prominent female scientists of the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish, came from an aristocratic background.

  • Cavendish was not a popularizer of science for women but a participant in the crucial scientific debates of her time.

  • As an aristocrat, she was the duchess of Newcastle, Cavendish was a good example of the women in France and England who worked in science

  • In Germany, women interested in science came from a different background.

• Maria Merian

  • A good example of female involvement in the Scientific Revolution stemming from the craft tradition was Maria Sibylla Merian, who had established a reputation as an important entomologist by the beginning of the eighteenth century.

  • In 1699, she undertook an expedition into the wilds of the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America to collect and draw samples of plants and insect life.

• Maria Winkelmann

  • The most famous of the female astronomers in Germany was Maria Winkelmann.

  • She was educated by her father and uncle and received advanced training in astronomy from a nearby self-taught astronomer.

  • As a woman, with no university degree, she was denied the post by the Berlin Academy, which feared that it would establish a precedent by hiring a woman.

  • Winkelmann's difficulties with the Berlin Academy reflect the obstacles women faced in being accepted in scientific work, which was considered a male preserve.

• Debates on the Nature of Women

  • The larger pelvic area ''proved'' that women were meant to be childbearers, and the larger skull ''demonstrated'' the superiority of the male mind.

  • Male dominated science had been used to ''prove'' male social dominance.

  • At the same time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women even lost the traditional spheres of influence they had possessed, especially in the science related art of midwifery.

  • Women serving as midwives had traditionally been responsible for birthing.

  • By the end of the eighteenth century, midwives were simply accessories to the art they had once controlled, except among the poor.

  • Overall, the Scientific Revolution reaffirmed traditional ideas about women.

  • Male scientists used the new science to spread the view that women were inferior by nature, subordinate to men, and suited by nature to play a domestic role as nurturing mothers.

  • Jean de La Bruye're, the seventeenth century French moralist, was typical when he remarked that an educated woman was like a gun that was a collector's item, which one shows to the curious, but which has no use at all, any more than a carousel horse.