Discussion 6

Lecture 10: The Scientific

Revolution, 1543-1600

Why then do we hesitate to grant [the Earth] the

motion which accords naturally with its form, rather

than attribute a movement to the entire universe

whose limit we do not and cannot know? And why

should we not admit, with regard to the daily

rotation, that the appearance belongs to the

heavens, but the reality is in the Earth?

---Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly

Bodies (1543)

One of the most important developments in the western

intellectual tradition was the Scientific Revolution. The

Scientific Revolution was nothing less than a revolution

in the way the individual perceives the world. As such,

this revolution was primarily an epistemological

revolution -- it changed man's thought process. It was

an intellectual revolution -- a revolution in human

knowledge. Even more than Renaissance scholars who

discovered man and Nature (see Lecture 1), the

scientific revolutionaries attempted to understand and

explain man and the natural world. Thinkers such as the

Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), the

French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) and the

British mathematician Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

overturned the authority of the Middle Ages and the

classical world. And by authority I am not referring

specifically to that of the Church -- the demise of its

authority was already well under way even before the

Lutheran Reformation had begun. The authority I am

speaking of is intellectual in nature and consisted of the

triad of Aristotle (384-322), Ptolemy (c.90-168) and

Galen (c.130-201). The revolutionaries of the new

science had to escape their intellectual heritage. With

this in mind, the revolution in science which emerged in

the 16th and 17th centuries has appeared as a

watershed in world history. The long term effects of

both the Scientific Revolution and the modern

acceptance and dependence upon science can be felt

today in our daily lives. And notwithstanding some

major calamity -- science and the scientific spirit will be

around for centuries to come. (For an excellent

overview of the Scientific Revolution see Robert Hatch's

The Scientific Revolution Home Page.)

In 1948, the British historian Herbert Butterfield (1900-

1979) prepared a series of lectures to be delivered at

the History of Science Committee at Cambridge. These

lectures became the foundation for his book, The

Origins of Modern Science. In the Preface to this work,

Butterfield wrote that:

The Revolution in science overturned the authority

in not only of the middle ages but of the ancient

world -- it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic

philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian

physics.

The key word here, I suppose, is authority. The

Renaissance and Reformation also attacked the

stranglehold of medieval authority but with quite a

different purpose and with decidedly different results.

However, Butterfield continues:

The Scientific Revolution outshines everything since

the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance

and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere

internal displacements within the system of

medieval Christianity.

Consider the period in which Butterfield makes this

statement. It's 1948, just a few years after Hiroshima --

78,000 men, women and children died within fifteen

minutes of the dropping of the atomic bomb. This is

what science has given us. And although I doubt

whether Butterfield, civilized Englishman that he was,

would have gloated over this fact of neat and efficient

killing, the fact remains that this was science in action.

There are numerous questions we could ask ourselves

about the Scientific Revolution: why it occurred? what

forces produced it? why was it so revolutionary? why

was it stronger in the Protestant North? But to my mind,

before we can even begin to cope with these questions

we must ask a much more basic question: What is

science?

Science is no doubt with us today -- it surrounds our

daily lives to such an extent that we now take it as a

given. We expect science to be, to exist. Its effects and

products touch the statesman and the soldier, the

house husband and the grocer. Science has given us

nylon, fluoride, latex paint as well as 747s, ever-faster

microchips and PEZ. But science has also given us

fluorocarbons, heroin, nuclear waste, dioxin, sarin gas

and the atomic bomb. Science can be a mixed blessing -

- with much that is good comes much that is clearly

bad. But, what do we mean by science?

Science is faith. And the Gospel of that faith was written

by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and

others. We are certainly not all scientists. I know I'm not

a scientist. But yet, I'm sure that scientists are busy at

work solving problems, the solution to which will help

me in some way. Perhaps scientists can improve our

situation here on earth, just as the Gospels perhaps did

almost two millennia ago. A scientist is an expert and

for some reason we have grown to trust experts. The

scientists, the technicians, the experts -- they must

know the answers to our questions.

We are surrounded by science whether we recognize it

or not. Just about everything we see, touch, smell and

hear, is a product of science. Furthermore, science has

a language all its own, a language which uses

expressions like: rational, method, methodological,

systematic, rules, laws, behavior, experts, technology

and so on.

What I would like to suggest is that for the non-scientist,

science is an idea. And this idea -- science -- gives us

ways in which to think about and explain our world and

ourselves. Science provides a world view, a way of

making sense out of the apparently random and

meaningless experience of our lives.

The origins of this world view emerged full blown in the

Scientific Revolution of the late 16th and 17th centuries.

The Revolution itself was European -- it was

cosmopolitan. Its short term effects were felt

throughout the Continent and in England. And today,

barely three or four centuries after the fact, there are

few areas on the globe that remain untouched by

modern science, whether for good or bad.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, scientists, theologians,

philosophers and mathematicians were engaged in a

vigorous debate over the natural world. Not so much

man, but Nature. After all, the Renaissance had refined

the dignity of man as perhaps distinct from the human

depravity that the Church had preached. Nature -- the

new focus was Nature. But why was this a subject for

examination? Why had Nature become the new object

of study? The reasons for this are complicated but for

now I will suggest that answer lay with the Christian

matrix. More specifically, the new focus on Nature was a

direct result of the collapse of the Christian matrix, and

this was the result of a combination of forces which

produced intellectual change. To be brief, these forces

were the Renaissance, Reformation (see Lecture 3), the

Age of Exploration (see Lecture 2) and the spirit of

capitalism. The major obstacle faced by the scientific

revolutionaries was one of knowledge -- it was a

specifically epistemological question. If an older world

view was to break down, then something would have to

take its place. A new human identity was required -- it

was essential to the changes in the intellectual climate.

How could the world be known? Another way of putting

this is to say that if the Renaissance had discovered

man and Nature, then it was up to the scientific

revolutionaries to verify their knowledge of man and

Nature.

What did science mean to the scientific revolutionaries?

One of the problems inherent in this question is that the

revolutionaries rarely used the word science. Instead,

they talked and wrote about natural philosophy or the

philosophy of nature. Nature, to them, meant the

natural world, that is, what was natural, what was not

made by human hands. I would suggest that using the

expression the philosophy of nature was really a

hangover from the medieval world. In other words,

questions of science were subsumed under the study of

philosophy, and since medieval man called the

phenomenal world Nature, then it was quite logical to

refer to the study of Nature as the philosophy of Nature.

Above all, science meant astronomy and mathematics.

These seemed to be the only two fields of study that

embraced both laws and the explanation of those laws.

Astronomy and mathematics have their own symbols --

they have their own language. This language, though

difficult, is stronger than any other language because of

its power to be understood by people who speak

different languages. In other words, the language of

science is universal. Whereas Charlemagne (742-814)

had created a scholarly language -- we call it, medieval

Latin -- the scientific revolutionaries created a language

of science, and we call this language, mathematics. The

legacy of all this to the modern world -- to our world --

was the scientific way of thinking -- it is a process of

thought which is technical, mathematical, logical and

precise. It's complicated too -- it's difficult for the non-

specialist to understand. But perhaps not that difficult.

Consider the following definition of man given by R.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), the father of the

geodesic dome:

Man is a self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base

biped, and electro-chemical reduction plant, integral

with the segregated stowages of special energy

extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent

activation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic

pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of

capillaries, millions of warning signal, railroad and

conveyor systems, crushers and cranes, and a

universally distributed telephone system needing no

service for seventy years if well managed, the

whole extraordinary complex mechanism guided

with exquisite precision from a turret in which are

located telescopic and microscopic self-registering

and recording range-finders, a spectroscope, etc.

This is science gone absolutely crazy. Of course, such a

definition of man ignores his nature -- his emotions,

dreams, joy, sadness, successes and failures. In fact,

Fuller seemed to ignore everything that made the

individual fully human. It is a mechanical explanation of

man -- man as machine. It is also an explanation of man

that would not have been possible had it not been for

an intellectual development we call the Scientific

Revolution. The irony, however, is that if somehow we

could have gotten Galileo and Fuller together over

lunch, Galileo would have perhaps found Fuller

positively mad (then again, Fuller would have not been

the type of person he was without Galileo as a

predecessor).

Before we talk about the scientific revolutionaries, the

implications of their work and their world view, it is

necessary to examine the medieval world view. It was,

after all, the world view of medieval man that the

scientific revolutionaries made the deliberate attempt

to overthrow. The medieval world view -- the linchpin of

the Christian matrix -- was fashioned from the ideas of

four men. Two of them were from the ancient world --

Aristotle and Ptolemy. And the other two were of the

medieval world -- St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274)

and Dante Alighieri, (1265-1321).

According to the medieval world view, Nature was

conceived to be kept going from moment to moment by

a miracle which was always new and forever renewed. It

was God who ordered the universe through these

miracles. This entire scheme depended not only upon

God, but upon the individual's absolute and unwavering

faith in God. If God pronounced it to be so, then it must

be so. But after 1350, let's say, by the time of Petrarch

(1304-1374), some men became more interested in the

form of the miracle. Knowing that the cosmos was of

divine origin and moved according to the will of God,

some men embraced that Faustian spirit that wanted to

know more. It was not enough to simply accept the

existence of miracles -- the miracles now had to be

explained. These men wanted to know what order, to

what hierarchy the miracle conformed. And this brings

us to the medieval view of cosmological order.

According to the intellectual tradition stretching from

Aristotle to Dante, all things in nature -- all phenomena -

- are composed of four fundamental elements. These

elements were air, fire, earth and water. These

elements were believed to follow certain laws -- they

were to follow their ideal nature. So, since they are

heavy and coarse, water and earth move downward.

Likewise, since they are light and airy, air and fire move

upward. Each of the four elements is constantly striving

to reach its natural center. The striving of all these

elements is what kept the cosmos going. In this scheme

of things, the elements of air and fire predominated and

together they composed a fifth element, more pure

than the rest, which the ancients called "the aether."

And since the heavenly bodies are "up there," they

must be composed of "the aether." (The reader

interested in a succinct overview of cosmology should

consult the Foundations of Modern Cosmology page.)

Which brings me to relate a brief story. In 1666, and

with the city of London burning down, Isaac Newton left

his study at Cambridge and made his way to his

mother's home at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. It was

here, in his mother's garden, that the great Newton was

struck by an idea -- the idea that the force which held

the planets in their orbit was the same force which

caused an apple to strike him in the head. Such an idea

-- we of course know it today as universal gravitation --

would have been absolutely unintelligible even to an

advanced medieval thinker. This is so for two reasons.

First, medieval man did not see the movement of the

heavenly bodies from the standpoint of the mechanics

of motion. The heavenly bodies, after all, were

composed entirely of aether. Theirs was an organic,

living world view rather than our now more familiar

mechanical conception. Second, and perhaps of even

more importance, medieval man could not understand

that the planets or the stars or comets were made of

the same stuff as an apple -- matter.

When it came to conceptualizing

the universe, the medieval world

borrowed its knowledge from the

Egyptian geographer and

astronomer Claudius Ptolemy

(c.90-c.168). The Ptolemaic

System put the stars on a fixed

sphere around the earth. At the

center was an object about which

nine concentric sphere were

situated. This object was the earth. Beyond the earth,

its position fixed, were the Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus,

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and then the stars, and finally, the

Prime Mover, the First Cause, God. The motions of the

planets were complicated. Ptolemy said the planets

moved in epicycles. The concept of epicycles was used

by Ptolemy to explain why planets seemed to exhibit

what is now known as retrograde motion, that is, the

tendency for planets to move in one direction, then

stop, change directions and then continue their original

movement. Ptolemy's system was accepted during the

Middle Ages but over time it became awkward. As

improvements were made in the skills of observation,

more and more epicycles were called for to explain the

movement of heavenly bodies. A simple, regular,

ordered and hierarchical system had, over time,

become very complicated. Criticism of the Ptolemaic

system began in the mid-16th century. The system

which eventually overthrew that of Ptolemy was not

based on criticism alone. Instead, another system took

its place -- and that system came with the emergence

of the New Science.

So monumental were

his achievements in

cosmology, the

Scientific Revolution

could almost have been

called the Copernican

Revolution. Born in

Poland in 1473, it was

the humble astronomer

Nicholas Copernicus

(1473-1543) who

challenged the

geocentrism of Ptolemy

with his own heliocentric universe. Ptolemy would never

recover -- neither would the Christian matrix.

Copernicus studied mathematics at Cracow and

managed to obtain a law degree from Bologna as well.

In 1500 he was in Rome where he witnessed a lunar

eclipse. The following year he studied medicine at

Padua and in 1505 he left Italy for Prussia. By 1512 he

was settled in Prussia where he not only observed the

movement of the heavenly bodies but also worked in

various capacities as a bailiff, military governor, judge,

tax collector, physician and reformer of the coinage. He

was an untypical man, an exceptional man, like one of

his contemporaries, Sir Thomas More, a Renaissance

man (see Lecture 1).

As we all know, it was Copernicus who determined that

the sun was at the center of the cosmos and that the

earth moved. Such an opinion alarmed his

contemporaries who could not explain that if the earth

were spinning then why was it that an arrow shot into

the air didn't fly off the face of the earth -- remember,

this is well before the idea of gravity had been

discovered by Newton. The Copernican system offended

the medieval sense that the universe was an affair

between God and man. Copernicus knew it too. The

ultimate authority, of course, was the Holy

Writ. That his contemporaries would be

alarmed by the heliocentric theory bothered

Copernicus. So, he decided to publish his

findings in 1543, the year of his death. It was

in that year that Copernicus published his

magnum opus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

(On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies) at

Nuremberg. The book was dedicated to Pope Paul III.

Aware that he could not persuade the traditional

thinking of the time, Copernicus made a specific appeal

to mathematicians. It was, he thought, only the

mathematician who could understand and appreciate

the order and essential simplicity of his system. In the

DEDICATION to this most revolutionary of scientific

treatises, Copernicus wrote:

mathematics is written for mathematicians, to

whom these my labors, if I am not mistaken, will

appear to contribute something.

Copernicus never expected that his findings would

appeal to the non-specialist. But in 1572 something

happened. A new star appeared in the constellation of

Cassiopeia. The new star was observed by the Danish

astronomer, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). The star was

brighter than any other star for more than two years --

contemporary accounts tell us that the star was so

bright that it could be seen in daylight. And in 1600,

another star appeared. This star was observed by

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). The heavens seemed to

be in flux. Such occurrences made lasting impressions

on all men, whether scientist or not. After all, this was

an age in which men believed their fate to be written in

the stars and now those stars were changing. What

Brahe and Kepler had seen were super-novas, the

explosions of old stars.

Kepler, even more than Copernicus, was literally carried

away by the strange relationship between numbers and

the properties of the natural world. In his books,

Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Mysterious Universe,

1596) and Harmonice Mundi (The Harmonious World,

1619) one theme is presented repeatedly: "Nature loves

simplicity." From his friend Brahe, Kepler learned that it

was necessary to take more accurate measurements

while observing the movement of the heavenly bodies.

In the end, Kepler determined the three laws of

planetary motion, which he published between 1609

and 1619. (1) planets move in elliptical orbits. (2)

explained the varying speed of the planets and so,

retrograde motion, (3) relates the movement of one

planet to all the others. With the discovery of these

three laws within the framework of the heliocentric

universe, the paths of the planets were mapped forever.

All that remained would be to see these three laws as

part of a single unity -- a single law which held each

planet in its orbit about the sun. This of course, would

have to wait another seventy years -- this single law

would have to wait for the genius of Isaac Newton. But

what was needed before Newton could go to work was a

more practical and elaborate understanding of the

mechanics of motion (see Lecture 11).