Scientific Revolution During 1600-1715

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) 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. Because such old truths as the formulation of the universe could now be questioned with scientific reasoning, other religious truths could also be questioned with new intellectual rigor. 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) 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.

But this mathematician is most famous for making his first telescope in 1609, modeled after telescopes produced in other parts of Europe that could magnify objects three times. (Wilde, "Biography," The Galileo Project Website, 2004) Galileo created a telescope that could magnify objects twenty times. With this telescope, he was able to look at the moons, satellites of Jupiter, and sunspots. His discoveries proved the Copernican system to be true as opposed to the geocentric system.

(Wilde, "Biography," The Galileo Project Website, 2004) The sun did not revolve around the earth, as stated in Aristotle's cosmology of a central Earth surrounded by concentric spherical shells carrying the planets and fixed stars was the basis of European thought from the 12th century CE onward. ("Copernican System," The Galileo Project Website, 2004) Born the same year Galileo died, Newton made a huge impact on theoretical astronomy. He defined the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

He used these to predict precisely the motions of stars, and the planets around the sun. Using his discoveries in optics Newton constructed the first reflecting telescope. (Chew, 1995) But what is least known about Newton is that he was also a religious philosopher as well. He denied the doctrine of the trinity, for instance. (Newton, 17) Although not as provable as the laws of gravity, Newton's freethinking and.