The Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution brought many new ideas and beliefs not only to Europe but the entire world. The most widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the "Scientific Revolution." In the popular mind, we associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but the scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly changed the human experience of every other aspect of life, from individual life to the life of the group. This modification in worldview can also be charted in painting, sculpture and architecture; you can see that people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are looking at the world very differently. The Scientific Revolution brought about many changed in both biology and astronomy. The former was concerned with the basics of physiology and anatomy; the latter was concerned with the issue of the solar system. These (and other) developments tended to proceed along independent lines until the
Europeans as well as others began to venture to other countries, trade and develop new social groups. These groups were confident in old popular beliefs that enlightenment was trying to change. It improved navigation, which in return facilitated overseas trade and helped enrich leading merchants. In De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, published in the year of his death, Copernicus suggested a new explanation of the apparent motions of heavenly bodies. He was a typical Renaissance man, freed from the oppressive authority of the church, but unable to sever himself from dependence on the authority of the classics which brought him that freedom. However this brought the Enlightenment into a conflict with churches, which rested their beliefs on authority of the Bible and Christian theology. However it did not appeal to the poor and peasants. " Galileo also contributed to the development of the scientific method. The work of a single individual may play a preeminent role in such a conceptual revolution, but if it does, it achieves preeminence either because, like De Revolutionibus, it initiates revolution by a small innovation which presents science with new problems, or because like Newton's Principia, it terminates revolution by integrating concepts deriving from many sources" (Copernican Revolution 182). He found the four satellites of Jupiter and saw that they revolved around the planet. With his discoveries, Kepler gave modern science a spirit of independence, a sense of freedom from any preconceived notions, regardless of the authority, which might stand behind them. The center of this orbit, however, did move around the Earth. His scientific successes were due to his ability to make what some historians have called "thought experiments.
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