4.2 The Scientific Revolution

Newton's synthesis was the climax. The same force that makes an apple fall keeps the moon in orbit. For many educated Europeans, this proved that the universe runs by regular laws that human reason can discover.

Galileo's telescope showed mountains on the moon, which was supposed to be perfect, and moons orbiting Jupiter, which proved not everything circled Earth. In 1616 the Church condemned the Copernican view. Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) seemed to mock the pope's position. The Roman Inquisition tried him in 1633, forced him to take back his views and kept him under house arrest until his death in 1642.

The case became a symbol of conflict between religion and science, but it was also about Galileo's clashes with powerful people. Many Catholic and Protestant scientists kept working, and Protestant leaders also rejected Copernicus at first.

Andreas Vesalius dissected human bodies and published On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), with detailed printed drawings that corrected many of Galen's errors, some of which came from animal dissection. William Harvey showed in 1628 that the heart pumps blood in a circuit through the body, overturning Galen's idea that blood was made in the liver and used up. Paracelsus pushed chemical remedies instead of balancing humors. Daily medical practice, like bleeding patients, changed slowly though.

Francis Bacon, an English politician, championed empiricism: knowledge comes from observation and experiment. He urged inductive reasoning, building general conclusions from many specific observations.

René Descartes, a French mathematician, championed rationalism: knowledge comes from logical reasoning. He doubted everything until he reached one certainty, I think, therefore I am, and then reasoned deductively from basic truths to specific conclusions. He also invented analytic geometry.

Together these produced the scientific method, combining experiment and math. Scientific societies spread the new methods, such as the Royal Society of London (1660) and the French Academy of Sciences (1666).

Older practices persisted. Kepler cast horoscopes, Newton spent years on alchemy (trying to transform metals), and most people still trusted folk remedies. These practices appealed partly because, like the new science, they assumed the universe followed rules that could be known and predicted. Many people also still believed spirits and unseen forces shaped events.

Women were mostly shut out of universities and societies, but some contributed. Margaret Cavendish wrote on natural philosophy, Maria Sibylla Merian studied insect life cycles, and Émilie du Châtelet later translated Newton's Principia into French.