The Scientific Revolution at Its Zenith 1620 1720
The Scientific Revolution at Its Zenith 1620 1720
The Scientific Revolution at Its Zenith 1620 1720
INTRODUCTION
During the 17th century, Europe experienced a series of changes in thought, knowledge and
beliefs that affected society, influenced politics and produced a cultural transformation. It
was a revolution of the mind, a desire to know how nature worked, to understand the natural
laws. The advances in knowledge resulted in a powerful wave that, emerging from
astronomy and mathematics, swept the habits, the culture, and the social behaviour of an
era.
This period in the history of Europe is known as the Scientific Revolution. The expression is
controversial, as historians are still debating when the revolution started and finished, who
were the main actors, and how it developed [Hatch 2002-03]. Although some historians
favour the figure of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and the heliocentric theory to mark the
beginning of the Scientific Revolution, others situate the origin in Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
and his description of the scientific method. Some other key figures of this period
were Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Johannes Kepler (1571-
During centuries, the study of the universe and the understanding of the world was founded
on deep thinking, on mulling over different questions trying to unearth the reasons or
explanations that gave clues to understanding the phenomena. By the 16th and 17th
centuries, the paradigm started to shift as some natural philosophers were rejecting
unproven theories and using precise tools to obtain exact measurements to base their
This was the idea that Francis Bacon defended in his work The New Organon (1620). Bacon
was a philosopher who did not perform any experiment himself but showed the way and
paved the road to knowledge with his vision. René Descartes, a French mathematician and
philosopher, expanded the scientific method proposed by Bacon introducing the concept of
analysis and describing its method in his book The Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting the Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637).
There, Descartes proposes that any problem in science, despite its complexity, can be
solved by breaking the problems into parts and solving each part separately, because the
parts would help to understand the whole. Reason and mathematical proof would shed light
philosophy, he can be credited with several specific achievements: co-framer of the sine law
naturalistic account of the formation of the earth and planets (a precursor to the nebular
hypothesis). More importantly, he offered a new vision of the natural world that continues to
shape our thought today: a world of matter possessing a few fundamental properties and
interacting according to a few universal laws. This natural world included an immaterial mind
that, in human beings, was directly related to the brain; in this way, Descartes formulated the
modern version of the mind–body problem. In metaphysics, he provided arguments for the
existence of God, to show that the essence of matter is extension, and that the essence of
mind is thought. Descartes claimed early on to possess a special method, which was
variously exhibited in mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and which, in the
latter part of his life, included, or was supplemented by, a method of doubt.
Descartes presented his results in major works published during his lifetime: the Discourse
on the Method (in French, 1637), with its essays, the Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry;
the Meditations on First Philosophy (i.e., on metaphysics), with its Objections and Replies (in
Latin, 1641, 2nd edn. 1642); the Principles of Philosophy, covering his metaphysics and
much of his natural philosophy (in Latin, 1644); and the Passions of the Soul, on the
emotions (in French, 1649). Important works published posthumously included his Letters (in
Latin and French, 1657–67); World, or Treatise on Light, containing the core of his natural
philosophy (in French, 1664); Treatise on Man (in French, 1664), containing his physiology
and mechanistic psychology; and the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (in Latin, 1701), an
Descartes was known among the learned in his day as a top mathematician, as the
developer of a new and comprehensive physics or theory of nature (including living things),
and as the proposer of a new metaphysics. In the years following his death, his natural
philosophy was widely taught and discussed. In the eighteenth century aspects of his
science remained influential, especially his physiology, as did his project of investigating the
knower in assessing the possibility and extent of human knowledge; he was also
remembered for his failed metaphysics and his use of skeptical arguments for doubting. In
the nineteenth century he was revered for his mechanistic physiology and theory that animal
bodies are machines (that is, are constituted by material mechanisms, governed by the laws
of matter alone). The twentieth century variously celebrated his famous ―cogito‖ starting
point, reviled the sense data that some alleged to be the legacy of his skeptical starting
point, and looked to him as a model of the culturally engaged philosopher. He has been
seen, at various times, as a hero and as a villain; as a brilliant theorist who set new
directions in thought, and as the harbinger of a cold, rationalistic, and calculative conception
of human beings. Those new to the study of Descartes should engage his own works in
and throughout his life he devised a wide range of conjectures and theorems. He is
also given credit for early developments that led to modern calculus, and for early
Orléans and received the title of councillor at the High Court of Judicature in
Toulouse in 1631, which he held for the rest of his life. He was fluent in Latin, Greek,
Italian and Spanish, and was praised for his written verse in several languages, and
with little or no proof of his theorems. Although he himself claimed to have proved all
his arithmetic theorems, few records of his proofs have survived, and many
mathematicians have doubted some of his claims, especially given the difficulty of
some of the problems and the limited mathematical tools available to Fermat.
also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague, and eventually the imperial mathematician
to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He also
between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between
astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch
into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created
the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light
of Venus, sunspots and the rugged lunar surface. His flair for self-promotion
earned him powerful friends among Italy‘s ruling elite and enemies among
brought him before religious authorities in 1616 and again in 1 633, when he
was forced to recant and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life .
In 1609 Galileo built his first telescope, improving upon a Dutch design. In
multitude of new stars in the Milky Way. In an attempt to g ain favor with the
rugged surface went against the idea of heavenly perfection, and the orbits
light integrated the phenomena of colours into the science of light and laid the
foundation for modern physical optics. In mechanics, his three laws of motion, the
basic principles of modern physics, resulted in the formulation of the law of universal
In the wake of the Renaissance, the 17th Century saw an unprecedented explosion of
mathematical and scientific ideas across Europe, a period sometimes called the Age of
Reason. Hard on the heels of the ―Copernican Revolution‖ of Nicolaus Copernicus in the
16th Century, scientists like Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were making
equally revolutionary discoveries in the exploration of the Solar system, leading to Kepler‘s
The invention of the logarithm in the early 17th Century by John Napier (and later improved
by Napier and Henry Briggs) contributed to the advance of science, astronomy and
mathematics by making some difficult calculations relatively easy. It was one of the most
significant mathematical developments of the age, and 17th Century physicists like Kepler
and Newton could never have performed the complex calculatons needed for their
innovations without it. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace
remarked, almost two centuries later, that Napier, by halving the labours of astronomers, had
The logarithm of a number is the exponent when that number is expressed as a power of 10
(or any other base). It is effectively the inverse of exponentiation. For example, the base 10
logarithm of 100 (usually written log10 100 or lg 100 or just log 100) is 2, because 102 = 100.
The value of logarithms arises from the fact that multiplication of two or more numbers is
equivalent to adding their logarithms, a much simpler operation. In the same way, division
two (or by three for cubing, etc), square roots requires dividing the logarithm by 2 (or by 3 for
Although base 10 is the most popular base, another common base for logarithms is the
number e which has a value of 2.7182818… and which has special properties which make it
very useful for logarithmic calculations. These are known as natural logarithms, and are
written loge or ln. Briggs produced extensive lookup tables of common (base 10) logarithms,
and by 1622 William Oughted had produced a logarithmic slide rule, an instrument which
Napier also improved Simon Stevin‘s decimal notation and popularized the use of the
decimal point, and made lattice multiplication (originally developed by the Persian
mathematician Al-Khwarizmi and introduced into Europe by Fibonacci) more convenient with
the introduction of ―Napier‘s Bones‖, a multiplication tool using a set of numbered rods.
Although not principally a
prime numbers that are one less Graph of the number of digits in the known
than a power of 2, e.g. 3 (22-1), 7 Mersenne primes
3 5 7
(2 -1), 31 (2 -1), 127 (2 -1), 8191
largest known prime number has almost always been a Mersenne prime, but in actual fact,
Mersenne‘s real connection with the numbers was only to compile a none-too-accurate list of
the smaller ones (when Edouard Lucas devised a method of checking them in the 19th
Century, he pointed out that Mersenne had incorrectly included 267-1 and left out 261-1, 289-1
The Frenchman René Descartes is sometimes considered the first of the modern school of
mathematics. His development of analytic geometry and Cartesian coordinates in the mid-
17th Century soon allowed the orbits of the planets to be plotted on a graph, as well as
laying the foundations for the later development of calculus (and much later multi-
dimensional geometry). Descartes is also credited with the first use of superscripts for
powers or exponents.
Two other great French mathematicians were close contemporaries of Descartes: Pierre de
Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Fermat formulated several theorems which greatly extended our
calculus. Pascal is most famous for Pascal‘s Triangle of binomial coefficients, although
similar figures had actually been produced by Chinese and Persian mathematicians long
before him.
It was an ongoing exchange of letters between Fermat and Pascal that led to the
development of the concept of expected values and the field of probability theory. The first
published work on probability theory, however, and the first to outline the concept of
developed the pivotal concept of the ―point at infinity‖ where parallels actually meet. His
perspective theorem states that, when two triangles are in perspective, their corresponding
By ―standing on the shoulders of giants‖, the Englishman Sir Isaac Newton was able to pin
down the laws of physics in an unprecedented way, and he effectively laid the groundwork
for all of classical mechanics, almost single-handedly. But his contribution to mathematics
with Archimedes and Gauss, as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
Newton and, independently, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz,
science in general) by the development of infinitesimal calculus, with its two main operations,
differentiation and integration. Newton probably developed his work before Leibniz,
but Leibniz published his first, leading to an extended and rancorous dispute. Whatever the
truth behind the various claims, though, it is Leibniz‘s calculus notation that is the one still in
use today, and calculus of some sort is used extensively in everything from engineering to
Both Newton and Leibniz also contributed greatly in other areas of mathematics,
differences and the use of infinite power series, and Leibniz‘s development of a mechanical
forerunner to the computer and the use of matrices to solve linear equations.
However, credit should also be given to some earlier 17th Century mathematicians whose
work partially anticipated, and to some extent paved the way for, the development of
―method of indivisibles‖. The Englishman John Wallis, who systematized and extended the
methods of analysis of Descartes and Cavalieri, also made significant contributions towards
the development of calculus, as well as originating the idea of the number line, introducing
the symbol ∞ for infinity and the term ―continued fraction‖, and extending the standard
notation for powers to include negative integers and rational numbers. Newton‗s teacher
Isaac Barrow is usually credited with the discovery (or at least the first rigorous statrement
of) the fundamental theorem of calculus, which essentially showed that integration and
differentiation are inverse operations, and he also made complete translations of Euclid into
The relationship between mathematics and physics has been a subject of study
of philosophers, mathematicians and physicists since Antiquity, and more recently also
physics" and physics has been described as "a rich source of inspiration and insight in
mathematics".
In his work Physics, one of the topics treated by Aristotle is about how the study carried out
mathematics being the language of nature can be found in the ideas of the Pythagoreans:
the convictions that "Numbers rule the world" and "All is number", and two millennia later
were also expressed by Galileo Galilei: "The book of nature is written in the language of
mathematics".
Before giving a mathematical proof for the formula for the volume of
a sphere, Archimedes used physical reasoning to discover the solution (imagining the
balancing of bodies on a scale). From the seventeenth century, many of the most important
advances in mathematics appeared motivated by the study of physics, and this continued in
the following centuries (although in the nineteenth century mathematics started to become
increasingly independent from physics). The creation and development of calculus were
strongly linked to the needs of physics: There was a need for a new mathematical language
to deal with the new dynamics that had arisen from the work of scholars such as Galileo
Galilei and Isaac Newton. During this period there was little distinction between physics and
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Newton
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