The Scientific
Revolution
David Beck
What is the scientific
revolution?

Term first used in the 1930s by Alexandre
Koyré

Butterfield (1957): “it outshines
everything since the rise of Christianity
and reduces the Renaissance and
Reformation to the rank of mere
episodes…”

Shapin (1996): “there was no such thing
as the scientific revolution, and this is a
book about it.”
What was the Scientific
Revolution?
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.
Alexander Pope
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants.
Isaac Newton
To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honour
or distinction than that connected with advances in science.
Isaac Newton
Themes of the lecture


Chronology: Columbus to Newton

The “new” and progress

The (re-)birth of empiricism

The aims of knowledge
Changes & continuities
Studying nature, c. 1500


The world of the university

Three “higher faculties” (medicine, law, theology)

Natural philosophy (theoretical), e.g. materia
medica (practical)

Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy,
music)

Ancient influences (e.g. Ptolemy, Aristotle, Pliny,
Galen)

Scholasticism (method of learning using dialectical
reasoning and disputation)
Natural philosophy
The importance of the “new”

Discovery of the Americas

1530: Girolamo Fracastoro,
Syphilis, or the French
Disease

1530-6: Otto Brunfels,
Portraits of Living Plants

1543: Andreas Vesalius, De
fabrica (On the Fabric of the
Human Body)
Explaining novelty

1543: Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Celestial
Spheres
“the scorn which I had reason to fear on account of the
novelty and unconventionality of my opinion almost
induced me to abandon completely the work which I had
undertaken…
I undertook the task of rereading the works of all the
philosophers which I could obtain to learn whether anyone
had ever proposed other motions of the universe's spheres
than those expounded by the teachers of astronomy in the
schools. And in fact first I found in Cicero that Hicetas
supposed the earth to move. Later I also discovered in
Plutarch that certain others were of this opinion”
Collecting and ordering
knowledge

1587: Conrad Gessner the History of Animals

Zwinger’s Theatrum humanae vitae

1565: one volume, 1,400 pages

Two more editions in Zwinger’s lifetime, grew to
4,500 pages by 1589

Re-worked in 1631 by Beyerlinck: eight volumes,
7,468 pages (and a 600 page index).
Improving “craft” knowledge



Art

Increasingly realistic depictions of nature

Use of artists/illustrators alongside naturalists/anatomists
etc.
Alchemy

“Secret” knowledge

Making nature perform through experiments
Medicine

Connections to the courts and employability

Barber-surgeons
1500-1600: a summary

Through the sixteenth century there was a gradual
acceptance of novelty (plants, animals, etc.) both in
new world and old.

Non-philosophical investigations of nature were
increasingly wide and successful.

Meanwhile, ‘natural philosophy’ in the universities was
much as it had been a century earlier.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Technology (the telescope)

Convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece

Initially c. 3x magnification, but improved to
30x

Patronage and courtly science

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632)

1633: called before the inquisition suspected
of heresy (for supporting Copernicus), the
Dialogue placed on the Index of Prohibited
Books and Galileo placed under house arrest
for life.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

No great discoveries, technological innovations or
inventions

Novum Organum:
“By the Fall man fell from both his state of innocence and
from his dominion over nature. But even in this life both of
those losses can be made good; the former by religion and
faith, the latter by arts and sciences.”
“sacred theology must be drawn from the word and oracles
of God, not from the light of nature.”
Bacon (2)

Information should be exchanged and
collected- “‘an inventory or enumeration
and view of inventions already discovered.”

Knowledge
was
to
"overcome
necessities and miseries of humanity”

The state should control and run all of this.

Direct observation and experimentation
the
“Puritan Science” and utility

Utopian fiction in England: Bacon’s New
Atlantis, Plattes/Hartlib Macaria

Hartlib circle and the reform movement
in the 1640s and 1650s:


Education

Political arithmetic
Plattes, Samuel Hartlib his Legacy (1655):
“Utopia may be had really, without any
fiction at all’
The Royal Society

Founded c. 1660

Individuals were to use their senses and witness
experiments that generated facts; individuals
were then to say what they believed to be the
truth.

Knowledge was constituted when all believed
alike.

“Your Majesty will certainly obtain Immortal
Fame, for having establish'd a perpetual
Succession of Inventors.”
Descartes and Hobbes
(note: ideas synthesised and simplified, a lot!
When revising and/or writing on this topic do not rely on
the slide)

We discover truth only by mathematical reasoning.

Everything must be stated at the outset in clear and
simple form, with gradual and logical argument advancing
to more complex formulations.

It is impossible for us to know the world. All we can know
is the result of sensory stimuli which may or may not
reflect “reality”.

Humans also behave rationally, so politics and the study of
man should also be based on mathematical deductions.
Changes & Continuities

Spaces & communication of/in science

from Italy to England

from universities to patronage networks to statesponsored societies

from ‘the book’ to ‘the world’ to ‘the laboratory’

Republic of Letters

Print
Changes and Continuities

How certain was knowledge, and how was it made
certain?


From the “disputed certainty” of philosophy to the
“accepted probability” of science
What was progress?

Recovering, improving and bettering ancient knowledge

Utopianism and the state

The link between theory and practice