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Western Civilizations, 3rd Brief Edition: A W. W. Norton StudySpace
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In This Chapter
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Chapter 16
The New Science Of The Seventeenth Century
Chapter Study Outline
Introduction
The new science
A body of knowledge
A method of inquiry
A community of practitioners and institutions
The scientific revolution
Heliocentricity
A new mathematical physics
New method of inquiry
Science as a distinctive branch of knowledge
Natural philosophythe philosophy of nature
Reason
Reform government
Reorder society
Purify religion
The Intellectual Origins of the Scientific Revolution
Medieval antecedents
Artists and their observations of the natural world
The magnetic compass
The printing press
Gunpowder
A fascination with light (optics and lens grinding)
A natural world created by God
Neoplatonism
The Renaissance
Humanists placed low value on science
More interested in classical antiquity and the authority of the ancients
Arabic translations of Greek classics
Rediscovery of Ptolemy and Archimedes
The universe as machine
Developing collaboration between artisans and intellectuals
Building machines for practical use
The laws of perspective and optics
Alchemy and astrology
Voyages of discovery
Travelers' accounts of foreign lands
Attacking the authority of the ancients
The Copernican Revolution
Medieval science
Authority of the ancients: Aristotle and Ptolemy
Heavenly bodies orbit in a hierarchy of spheres
Heavens and earth composed of different matter
The "quintessence" (the ether)
Earth, air, fire, and water
The "prime mover"
Late Middle Ages developments
Ptolemaic system did not conform to observations
Retrograde motion
Roman calendar out of alignment with movement of heavenly bodies
The "problem" of Easter and other holy days
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
Renaissance Man
Ptolemaic system had become too messy
Copernican system
The earth moved and was not the center of the planetary system
The earth rotated on its axis and orbited the sun
Believed he had restored a pure understanding of God's plan but was troubled by its implications
New problems and inconsistencies
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543)
Tycho's Observations and Kepler's Laws
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)
Born into the Danish nobility
A champion of observation
Observed the appearance of a new star (nova) in 1572
Built his own observatory
Tycho not a Copernican
Planets orbited the sun, the whole of which orbited a stationary earth
Court astronomer to Rudolph II at Prague
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Served as Tycho's assistant
Everything had been created according to mathematical laws
Mathematics as the language of God
Mathematical perfection and musical harmonies
Three laws of planetary motion
Planets travel in elliptical orbits
Speed of the planets vary with their distance from the sun
Magnetic forces keep the planets in orbital motion
Cosmographic Mystery (1596)
New Astronomy or Celestial Physics (1609)
The Harmonies of the World (1619)
Broke down the distinctions between the heavens and the earth
New Heavens, New Earth, and Worldly Politics: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Galileo the man
A witty and persuasive writer (wrote in Latin and Italian)
A popularizer of the non-Aristotelian approach to science
Impatient with those who opposed him
A new relationship between religion and science
Controversy and the collision course with the Church
The telescope
Built his own telescope in 1610
Observed the features of the moon, the moons of Jupiter, and sun spots
A challenge to heavenly perfection
The Starry Messenger (1610)
The need for a patron
Disliked power of university authorities
Turned to princely courts
Took a position as tutor to the Medicis
Conflict with the Church
A Dominican monk denounced Galileo's ideas as a dangerous deviation
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina de Medici (1615)
One can be a sincere Copernican and a Catholic
Understanding the physical world is best left to the natural philosopher
1616: the Inquisition declares heretical the proposition that the earth moves
Copernicus's De Revolutionibus is placed on the Index of Forbidden Books
A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
Inquisition banned the book
Galileo ordered to stand trial in 1633
Recanted his beliefs and placed under house arrest for life
The legacy
The theory of inertia
Law of falling bodies
Two New Sciences (1638)
Combined discovery, observation, experiment, and mathematics
Suggested universal laws of motion
The new science moves out of Italy to northwest Europe
Methods for a New Philosophy: Bacon and Descartes
The need for a scientific method
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
New confidence in the potential of human thought
Lord Chancellor to James I
The "ancients" and "moderns"
Separation of scientific investigation from philosophical argument
The inductive method
Combining evidence from observations to draw general conclusions
Cooperation between researchers
"Useful" knowledge
Great Instauration (1620)
The New Atlantis (1626)
Solomon's House
René Descartes (1596-1650)
An intellectually restless man
The Discourse on Method (1637)
Began as an essay on optics, geometry, and meteorology
Systematic doubt of everything
Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am")
The thinking person exists, reason exists, God exists
The deductive method
A "fresh start for knowledge"
Proceeds logically from one certainty to another
Mathematical thought an expression of the highest standards of reason
A mechanical philosophy
Nature as machine
Rejected the medieval distinction between the works of man and those of nature
Toward a new conception of matter
Nature and natural laws
The Power of Method and the Force of Curiosity: Seventeenth-Century Experimenters
The Cartesians
Mostly France and Holland
Mathematics and logic
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Probability theory
Theology
Christian Huygens (1629-1695)
The problem of impact and orbital motion
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
Applied geometry to ethics
The Baconians
Began with practical research
Sought empirical laws based on evidence
William Harvey (1578-1657)
The circulation of blood
Dissected live animals
Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
Boyle's law
Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
Introduced the microscope
The cellular structure of plants
God as clockmaker
Science, society, and the state
The Royal Society (charter granted 1662)
Committed to experiment and collaborative work
Serving political and intellectual purposes
A common sense of purpose
Philosophical Transactions
Reached out to professional scholars across Europe
French Academy of Sciences (1666)
A state-sponsored framework for scientific endeavor
Easing the exchange of information and theories
Women and science
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)
Maria Winkelmann (1670-1720)
Refused admission to Berlin Academy of Science
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717)
Studied entomology
"And All Was Light": Isaac Newton, 1643-1727
The culmination of the Scientific Revolution
Newton the man
Born to a family of small landowners
Studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (stayed thirty-five years)
A reclusive, secretive, and obsessive man
Newton the scientist
Optics
Used prisms to demonstrate that light was composed of different colored rays
Mathematics
Integral and differential calculus
Gravity
The falling apple
Reflective telescope
Elected to the Royal Society (1672)
Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)
Published in 1687 (prompted by Edmund Halley)
A long and difficult work
Gravitation was a universal force that could be expressed mathematically
Built on the work of Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Descartes, and Hooke
A single, descriptive account of mass and motion
The laws of gravitation
The General Scholium (1713) answered objections to the Principia
Newton's legacy
Certainty and objectivity lay in the precise mathematical characterization of phenomena
Popularization of Newton by John Locke
Buried at Westminster Abbey (Pope's couplet)
Voltaire spread Newtonian ideas to France
Transformations: Science and Cultural Change
Science and modernity
Science as a justification for Western expansion of empire
Observations
Science and elite knowledge
The authority of the ancients did not disappear quickly
Science did not subvert religion
Newton as a transitional figure between the past and the future
New answers to fundamental questions
Science and scientific institutions
The purpose and practice of science
The role of mathematics
Conclusion