The modern world is dominated by science, which has led to unprecedented achivements in technology, health, and entertainment. What we today call "science" (and which at the time was called "natural philosophy") really took off in the seventeenth century, at the beginning of the Baroque Period. Although the story is often told as if scholars woke up one morning, threw Aristotle out the window and believing in God, that is not accurate. (After all, Copernicus was a church canon and Newton wrote more about theology than science.) What happened was a shift in methodology: scientists began to focus only on the quantifiable aspects of reality, leaving qualitative questions to one side. In other words, scientists stopped asking "Why?" and focused only on "How?" This method proved enormously successful for making predictions and developing new mechanical technologies to increase man's control over nature.
Some of the Scientific Revolution's most famous actors of this time period are described below:
Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who first proposed a heliocentric model of the universe. Unsatisfied with the ancient Greek model proposed by Ptolomey, which despite being relatively accurate was exceedingly complicated, Copernicus believed reality could be better explained by a simple system of circular orbits around the sun. He published his model in 1543. The Copernican system had its own issues, but its elegance intrigued the next generation of astronomers.
Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who created a model of the solar system that combined the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In Brahe's model, the planets orbited the sun, but the sun orbited the earth. While not entirely accurate, his model was supported with large amounts of empircal evidence, in particular the lack of any observable stellar parallax, which seemed to suggest the earth was indeed stationary.
Kepler was a student of Brahe's and is known for his Three Laws of Planetary Motion, which used Brahe's data to replace Copernicus' circular orbits for elliptical ones, which is much closer to the truth.
Galileo was one of the first astronomers to use a telescope to aid in his observations. He rejected the Tychnoic model in favor of the Copernican one. Although he initially had a supporter in Pope Urban VIII, he fell out with the pope in 1632 and was tried by the Roman Inquisition and placed under house arrest.
René Descartes (day-cart) is usually described as the first "modern" philosopher. He explicitly rejected Aristotelian formal and final causes, which science had been ignoring for the last century. Since rejecting these basically means there is nothing to physical reality that cannot be measured, Descartes advocated mind-body dualism: the idea that there is a visible, material world of things like rocks, plants, and animals, and also a separate invisible, immaterial world of things like souls, thoughts, angels.
Newton was a polymath who wrote on nearly every subject (he actually wrote more about theology than science), but his true brilliance was as a mathematician and physicist. He is mainly known for his Laws of Motion and Theory of Universal Gravitation. Newton's breakthrough was describing the behavior of objects in the form of mathematical "Laws of Nature."
.jpg)