The Scientific Revolution

Just at the end of the Renaissance era began a time period we call the Scientific Revolution, which ended in the late 18th century. With the advancement of the printing press, we saw rapid intellectual communication spread across the globe.

 Copernicus published a book about the sun being the center of the solar system, and that kicked off the scientific revolution. Our understanding of Earth's place in our solar system was challenged with his book. 

Here's a page with his diagram.

Before this time people assumed that the Earth was the center of the solar system. Nicolaus Copernicus described the mathematics behind a solar system with the sun at the center. His calculations weren't quite accurate because he assumed the orbits were perfectly circular, which they aren't. Kepler made the radical advancement of suggesting that the orbits of the planets might be ovals, and he took the theory further by calculating those more accurate orbits. 

So, next came visual evidence of these mathematical theories. That is where Galileo came in with the invention of the telescope. Here's a diagram of a refracting telescope.

He was able to accurately track many of the planets and observed Jupiter's moons. This meant that Earth wasn't the center of everything, since Jupiter was the center of something, too. Galileo also calculated the speed of light!

Here's a photo of a museum display that includes a replica of Galileo's telescope.

 But people still doubted. That's when Sir Isaac Newton came in and explained this phenomenon with gravity. The same force that sends an apple to the ground is what keeps the planets in orbit around the sun. Sir Isaac Newton's masterpiece "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" brought together a synthesis of many past works in the law of universal gravitation. Sir Newton died in `717, and by then everyone had embraced the scientific method and institutions like societies worked to move science forward. At the end of the Scientific Revolution came the time period of The Enlightenment. These books written by Copernicus and Newton were able to get widely circulated across the globe because of the invention of the printing press. Here's a replica of one of the first printing presses.

 The same year that Copernicus published a book about the sun (1543), Vesalius published "On the Fabric of the Human Body" a book that provided intricate woodcut illustrations that were able to be reproduced accurately across all editions using a printing press. He wrote this book after making extensive observations of humans that he dissected. This book gave us a far more accurate hands-on understanding of the human body than any other book. Like a road map, which made advancements in surgery possible. Even something as basic as an understanding that the heart was the center of the circulatory system was unknown before this time! 

Another major invention that drove scientific discovery was the ability to explain complex concepts like gravity using mathematics. Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz co-authored a new math called Calculus. Leibniz didn't just stop with calculus. He also invented Binary. He called Binary the "alphabet of human thought" and described all numbers as a power of two. He built the first calculator, called a "stepped reckoner". Here's a photo of one in a museum.

Leibniz is now commonly called the great grandfather of computer science. To develop Binary, he combined Chinese philosophy with Western mathematics. How? He noticed a pattern in a copy of the i-Ching, and described it with math. Something that allowed science to rapidly advance is the formalization of the Scientific Method, which was done by Sir Francis Bacon.

 Another major advancement was developing the metric system. This standardized set of measurements allowed scientists all over the world to be able to communicate easily about the same distances and weights. With standard measurements, scientists could explain their theories accurately mathematically.

What are your favorite resources to learn about the scientific revolution?

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