Scientific Revolution
Brion Mckenzie
What was the change?
- human history various events have changed the way people have lived. These events can be political revolution social and religious changes, new technologies, or the exploration of unknown places. These changes occur in two different fashions, evolution and revolution.
- Evolution: is the gradual change or development of something. An example of historical evolution would be the development of democracy in Great Britain.
- Revolution: is a sudden or abrupt change in something, usually political in nature. An example of historical revolution is the French Revolution. Over a few short years France's government changed from absolute monarchy, to constitution monarchy, to democratic republic, to dictatorship, and back to monarchy. Whatever the process, history is about change. This thematic review focuses on the major periods of that change, and the turning points of human history.
Who were the people associated with the change
Nicoloaus Copernicus
- heliocentric view (instead of geocentric view); published On Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (1543) near his death; condemned by all levels of Christianity
Galileo Galilei
- improve the telescope, proved Copernicus's heliocentric theory, challenged Greco-Roman medical authority, brought forth the experimental method, threatened by the Church and recanted his works
Sir Isaac Newton
When Newton arrived in Cambridge in 1661, the movement now known as the scientific revolution was well advanced, and many of the works basic to modern science had appeared. Astronomers from Copernicus to Kepler had elaborated the heliocentric system of the universe. Galileo had proposed the foundations of a new mechanics built on the principle of interia. Led by Descartes, philosophers had begun to formulate a new conception of nature as an intricate, impersonal, and inert machine. Yet as far as the universities of Europe, including Cambridge, were concerned, all this might well have never happened. They continued to be the strongholds of outmoded aristrotelianism, which rested on a geocentric view of the universe and dealt with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.
How did the change impact the society at the time?
- The main purpose of this course is to review some of the most important scientific revolutions that took place in the history of science (Heliocentric, Newtonian, the Chemical, the Relativistic, the Quantum, and the Darwinian revolutions), and to present and discuss their historical context, and origin, the struggle of the individual scientists for scientific truth, and how they succeeded in changing the dominant views on nature and society. The scientific revolutions had a deep social impact, by changing the world and the way of life through the development of new technologies, and shaping a new social order. The course will promote open discussion on the social contexts and socio-cultural impacts of the major scientific discoveries. Scientific knowledge and the procedures used by scientists influence the way many individuals in society think about themselves, others, and the environment, and deeply influence the way of life of common people through technology. The course will address the following fundamental issues: what is science and how it works; the nature of research; normal science (paradigm), and its development; scientific anomaly and the shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions; the scientific revolution and its meaning and consequences; and the social impact of the scientific revolution.
How does that change evidence in today's modern society?
- Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and 18th century, the most widely influential was an epistemology 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 world view 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.