Unit 4 - Scientific, Philosophical, and Political Developments (1648 - 1815)
Topic 4.2: The Scientific Revolution #6ead82
The Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment : Notes From Class
Scientific Method
- Before the Scientific Revolution began, scholars relied on Greek and Roman authors as well as the Church (Bible) to determine truth.
- The Scientific Revolution brought about a NEW way of thinking about the natural world through hypothesizing, observations, experimentations. These observations challenged the thoughts of old.
- Scientific Revolution was fueled through exploration and the invention of the printing press.
What was the Enlightenment?
- A European movement in which thinkers attempted to apply rhetoric principles of reason and the scientific method to all aspects of society.
- The ideas of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution led to new ideas about society and government and made people rely on rational thoughts rather than just accepting traditional belief.
Major Breakthroughs : Notes From The Book #a7e2b2
Scientific Thought in 1500
- Natural philosophy, which focused on fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, its purpose, and how it functioned.
- In the early 1500s natural philosophy was still based primarily on the ideas of Aristotle.
- In the first eight spheres were embedded, in turn, the moon, the sun, the five known planets, and the fixed stars. The followed two spheres added during the Middle Ages.
(Aristotle) - The great Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C.E. According to the revised Aristotelian view, a motionless earth was fixed at the center of the universe and was encompassed by ten separate concentric crystal spheres that revolved around it.
- Aristotle’s cosmology made intellectual sense, but it could not account for the observed motions of the stars and planets and, in particular, provided no explanation for the apparent backward motion of the planets.
- According to Ptolemy, the planets moved in small circles, called epicycles, each of which moved in turn along a larger circle, or deferent.
- Ptolemaic astronomy was less elegant than Aristotle neat nested circles and required complex calculations, but it provided a surprisingly accurate model for predicting planetary motion.
- Aristotle had distinguished sharply between the world of the celestial spheres and that of the earth - the sublunar world. The spheres consisted of a perfect, incorruptible “quintessence", or fifth essence.
- The sublunar world, however, was made up of four imperfect, changeable elements.
- Light elements (air and fire) naturally move upwards, while the heavy elements (water and earth) naturally move downward.
- Aristotle’s science as interpreted by Christian theologians also fit neatly with Christian doctrines. It established a home for God and a place for Christian souls.
Origins of the Scientific Revolution
- By the 13th century permanent universities had been established in western Europe to train the lawyers, doctors, and church leaders society required.
- By 1300 philosophy - including Aristotelian natural philosophy - had taken its place alongside law, medicine, and theology.
- Many Greek texts, including many works of the philosopher Aristotle, which were lost to the West after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 15th century, re-entered circulation through translation from the Arabic in the 12th century.
- In the 14th and 15th centuries leading universities established new professorships of mathematics, astronomy, and optics within their faculties of philosophy.
- Renaissance patrons played a role in funding scientific investigations, as they did for art and literature.
- The encyclopedic treatise on botany by the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus was rediscovered in the 1450s, moldering on the shelves of the Vatican library.
- The fall of the Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453 resulted in a great influx of little-known greek works, as Christian scholars fled to Italy with their precious texts.
- The rise of printing in the mid 15th century provided a faster and less expensive way to circulate knowledge.
- As early as 1484 the king of Portugal appointed a commission of mathematicians to perfect tables to help seamen find their latitude.
- Navigation and cartography led to the telescope, barometer, thermometer, pendulum clock, microscope, and air pump.
- For most of human history, interest in astronomy was inspired by the belief that the changing relationships between planets and stars influence events on earth, and was held until the Scientific Revolution.
- The idea that objects possessed invisible or “occult” qualities that allowed them to affect other objects through their innate “sympathy” with each other was a particularly important legacy of the magical tradition.
The Copernican Hypothesis
- Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543), he noted that astronomers still depended on the work of Ptolemy for their most accurate calculations, but he felt that Ptolemy’s cumbersome and occasionally inaccurate rules detracted from the majesty of a perfect creator.
- He preferred an alternative ancient Greek idea: that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the universe.
- Copernicus worked on his hypothesis from 1506 to 1530, he theorized that the stars and planets, including earth, revolved around a fixed sun.
- Copernicus did not publish his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres universe 1543, the year of his death.
- The Copernican hypothesis had enormous scientific and religious implications, many of which the conservative Copernicus did not anticipate.
- Destroyed the main reason from believing in crystal spheres capable of moving the stars around the earth.
- if in the course of a year the earth moved around the sun and yet the stars appeared to remain in the same place, then the universe was unthinkably large.
- He challenged the traditionally hierarchy of the disciplines
- Copernicus destroyed the basic idea of Aristotelian physics - that the earthly sphere was quite different from the heavenly one.
- Copernicus’s ideas drew little attention prior to 1600, because the Catholic Church has never held to literal interpretations of the Bible, it did not officially declare the Copernican hypothesis false until 1616.
- In 1572 a new star appeared and shone very brightly for almost 2 years.
- In 1577 a ew comet suddenly moved through the sky, cutting a straight path across the supposedly impenetrable crystal spheres.
Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo: Proving Copernicus Right
- Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601), he established himself as Europe’s leading astronomer with his detailed observations of the new star of 1572.
- Brahe acquired a new patron in the Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II and built a new observatory in Prague.
- He believed that all the planets except the earth revolved around the sun and that the entire group of sun and planets revolved in turn around the earth-moon system. ( died in 1601)
- It was left to Brahe’s young assistant, Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630), to rework Brahe’s mountain of observations.
- Kepler was inspired by his believed that the universe was built on mystical mathematical relationships and musical harmony of heavenly bodies.
- Largely through observations of the planet around the sun are elliptical rather than circular.
-He demonstrated that the planets do not move at a uniform speed in their orbits. When a planet is close to the sun it moves more rapidly, and it slows as it moves farther away from the sun
- In 1619 Kepler put forth his third law: the time a planet takes to make its complete orbit is precisely related to its distance from the sun.
- Kepler proved mathematically the precise relations of a sun-centered solar system
- Florentine named Galilea Galilei (1564 - 1642) was challenging all the old ideas about motion.
- His great achievement was the elaboration and consolidation of the experimental method.
- Through another experiment, he formulated the law of inertia. He found that rest was not the natural state of objects. Rather, an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by some external force.
- He quickly discovered the first four moons of Jupiter, which clearly suggested that Jupiter could not possible be embedded in any impenetrable crystal sphere.
- In 1597, when Johannes Kepler sent Galilea an early publication defending Copernicus, Galileo replied that it was too dangerous to express his support for Heliocentrism publicly
- He silences his beliefs for several years, until in 1623 he saw new hope with the ascension of Pope Urban VIII, a man sympathy to developments in the new science.
- His work went too far and the papal Inquisition placed Galileo on trail for heresy. Imprisoned and threaten with torture.
Newton’s Synthesis
- About 1640 the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo had been accepted in the scientific community.
- Issac Newton (1642 - 1727) viewed alchemy as one path, alongside mathematics and astronomy, to the truth of God’s creation.
- Newton arrived at some of his most basic idea about physics between 1664 and 1666.
- Newton did not publish them, and upon his return to Cambridge he took up the study of optics.
- In1684 Newton returned to physics and the preparation of his ideas for publication.
- Newton’s three laws of motion, using a set of mathematical laws that explain motion and mechanics.
- The key feature of the Newtonian synthesis was the law of universal gravitation, (Newton’s law that all objects are attracted to one another and that the force of attraction is proportional to the object’s quantity of matter and inversely proportionally to the square of the distance between them)
- The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried won Leibniz, which whom Newton contested the invention of calculus, was outraged by Newton’s claim that the “occult” force of gravity could allow bodies to affect one another at great distances.
Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Method
- Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) and Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650), were influential in describing and advocating for improved scientific methods based, respectively, on experimentation and mathematical reasoning.
- Bacon formalized the empirical method, which had already been used by Brahe and Galileo, into the general theory of inductive reasoning known as empiricism, (A theory of inductive reasoning that calls for acquiring evidence through observation and experimentation rather than deductive reason and speculation)
- Descartes saw that there was a perfect correspondence between geometry and algebra and that geometrical spatial figures could be expressed as algebraic equations and vice versa.
- Descartes used mathematics to elaborate a highly influential vision of the working of the cosmos.
- Descartes mechanistic view of the universe depended on the idea that a vacuum was impossible, which meant that every action had an equal reaction, continuing in an eternal chain reaction. This was later proved wrong.
- Descartes greatest achievement was to develop his initial vision into a whole philosophy of knowledge and science.
- His view of the world as consisting of two fundamental entities is known as Cartesian dualism, (Descartes’ view that all of reality could ultimately be reduced to mind and matter)
Important Changes: Notes From The Book
Medicine, the Body, and Chemistry
- Illness was believed to result from an imbalance of humors, which is why doctors frequently prescribed bloodletting to expel excess blood.
- (Galen), an ancient Greek physician. According to Galen, the body contained four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
- Paracelsus (1493 - 1541) was an early proponent of the experimental method in medicine and pioneered the use of chemicals and drugs to address what he saw as chemical.
- Andreas Vesalius (1516 - 1564) studied anatomy by dissecting human bodies, often those of executed criminals
- In 1543, Vesalius issued his masterpiece, On the structure of the Human Body. The experimental approach also led William Harvey (1578 - 1657) to discover the circulation of blood through the veins and arteries in 1628.
- Robert Boyle (1627 - 1691) discovered the basic elements of nature, which he believed was composed to infinitely small atoms, and the first to create a vacuum, thus disproving Descartes’ belief that a vacuum could not exist.
- Boyle’s law (1662), which states that the pressure of a gas varies inversely with volume.
Empire and Natural History
- Building on the rediscovery of Theophrastus’s botanical treatise and other classical texts, early modern scholars published new worked cataloguing forms of life in northern Europe, Asia, and the Americas that were unknown to the ancients
- There encyclopedias of natural history included realistic drawings and descriptions that emphasized the usefulness of animal and plant species for trade, medicine, food, and other practical concerns.
- European governments eager to learn and profit from their imperial holdings. The physician of King Philip II of Spain spent 7 years in new Spain in the 1560s recording thousands of plant species and interviewing local healers about their medicinal properties.
- In this period the craze for collecting natural history specimens in Europe extended from aristocratic lords to middle-class amateurs.
Science and Society
- The personal success of scientists and scholars depended on making new discoveries, and science became competitive.
- The practice of science in the 17th century often relied on artisans’ expertise in making instruments and conducting precise experiments
- Scholars have noted that nature was often depicted as a female, whose veil of secrecy needed to be “rational” methods for approaching nature did not question traditional inequalities between the sexes - may have worsened them in some way.
- The rise of universities and other professional institutions for science raised new barriers because most of these organizations did not accept women.
- Women across Europe worked as makers of wax anatomical models and as botanical and zoological illustrators, like Maria Sibylla Merian.
- In England, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Mary Atell all contributed to debates about Descartes’ mind-body dualism, among other issues.
- Yet Christian Europe was still strongly attached to its established political and social structure and its traditional spiritual belief.
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Topic 4.3: The Enlightenment
Timeline
- 13th century: Permanent universities had been established in western Europe to train the lawyers, doctors, and church leaders society required. Philosophy - including Aristotelian natural philosophy - had taken its place alongside law, medicine, and theology.
- 14th century: Leading universities established new professorships of mathematics, astronomy, and optics within their faculties of philosophy.
- 1450s: The encyclopedic treatise on botany by the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus was rediscovered.
- 1453: The fall of the Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans resulted in a great influx of little-known greek works, as Christian scholars fled to Italy with their precious texts.
- 1473: Nicolaus Copernicus was born
- 1484: King of Portugal appointed a commission of mathematicians to perfect tables to help seamen find their latitude.
- 1506:
- 1543: Nicolaus Copernicus died and published his On the Revolutions.
- mid 15th century: The rise of printing provided a faster and less expensive way to circulate knowledge.