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Scientific Revolution of 1600-1715 -- When humanity shook its free from the grips of the fallacy that 'Man is the center of the solar system,' it gained the confidence to raise the human scientific intellect to the center of the political, religious, and mathematical world.
According to Roy T. Matthews and F. DeWitt Platt, the scientific revolution of 1600-1715 was a paradoxical one. (Matthews & DeWitt, 2004) Before, according to Aristotle and the Catholic Church, humanity and the earth were the centers of the solar system. (Wilde, "Copernicus," The Galileo Project Website, 2004) But during this historical period, the intellectual reconfiguring of the cosmological world in the consciousness of the human animal put humanity on the periphery of the sun. Now, the earth, and by extension humanity, was merely in rotation amid other planets, a mere speck of thought upon a larger earth in a larger, impersonal universe. (Wilde, "Biography," The Galileo Project Website, 2004) The sovereignty of the monarch could also be questioned as well. The Copernican Revolution of Galileo, by putting the earth in its proper, one could say inferior place, paradoxically raised human thought to a new and important level, more important than any institutionalized truths of Catholicism or the kings of Europe. (Wilde, "Copernicus," The Galileo Project Website, 2004) This sowed the seeds for the later influxes of humanitarian revolutions of thought, in the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and later political authors. (Matthews & DeWitt, 2004)
Yet because of rather than despite this new understanding, human reason and a concern for individuals rather than God, the State, and the noble aristocracy came to the forefront of the scientific consciousness during this period.
Thus, from the early, classical geocentrism of Aristotle and Ptolemy, as reified by the Catholic Church came a new empiricism, of inductive and deductive reasoning where it was not so important to prove religious dogma, as it was to tell the truth about the world, as observed from scientific eyes. The two figures of Galileo and Newton perhaps best embody this ethos of unbiased observations. Galileo invented many mechanical devices such as pumps and balances.…
Works Cited
Chew, Roy. "Sir Isaac Newton Scientist and Mathematician." Library. 1995. Last Updated. August 19, 2004. (October 19, 2004)
http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/95dec/newton.html
Matthews, Roy T. And F. DeWitt Platt. The Western Humanities. New York: McGraw hill, 2003.
Newton, Isaac. "A Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture." 1690. Available online. (October 19, 2004). http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/newton1.html
http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/theories/copernican_system.html
http://galileo.rice.edu/bio/tov.html
The universe viewed through a telescope looked different, and this difference in itself played into the Protestant argument that received truths may be fallible. In fact, the notion of truth outside empirical evidence became unsteady: For most thinkers in the decades following Galileo's observations with the telescope, the concern was not so much for the need of a new system of physics as it was for a new system of
Technology has now reached such dizzying heights that it attempts to give us here and now the Empyrean that Galileo's telescope neglected to find. How has it worked? Perhaps that should be the subject of another discussion. All the same, it is interesting to note that modern science is still attempting to explain the mysteries of the universe that in the medieval world were simply accepted on faith as