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The Scientific Revolution, 1543-1600

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, 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.

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

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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, the Age of Exploration 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

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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

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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."

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.

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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

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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.

In a previous lecture I suggested that before Isaac Newton could conceive of and demonstrate the laws of universal gravitation, a practical understanding of motion was required (see Lecture 10). This practical understanding of mechanics would be provided by an Italian astronomer and mathematician by the name of Galileo Galilei. Born at Pisa in 1564, Galileo studied medicine and mathematics and became a professor at Pisa in the late 1580s. But because the largely Aristotelian faculty was hostile to him, Galileo decided to move on to Florence. Eventually he settled at Padua and between 1592 and 1610 his mathematics lectures at the university attracted students from

across the Continent.

The key to all of Galileo's discoveries was the accurate measurement of time. Accurate measurement of time was essential if the mechanics of motion were to be explained. By 1600, there were no accurate clocks or time keeping devices. There were clocks, of course, but none of them were at all precise. Medieval clocks were convenient for dividing the day but not for keeping precise time. Galileo was fascinated with time. As the story goes, Galileo was attending a religious service at Pisa in 1583. His thoughts began to wander and as he gazed about he noticed the swinging motion of a lamp that hung from the ceiling. It was then that Galileo was struck by the uniform motion of the pendulum. The pendulum, if kept swinging at a constant rate, keeps near perfect time. Galileo experimented with various sorts of motions and falling bodies. This, after all, was what helped him determine the mechanics of motion. His observations of falling bodies at Pisa are only the most well known of his experiments. He rolled balls of varying size and

weight down slopes with varying angles of incline. He showed that an object thrown into the air falls to the earth along a parabola. What he ended up doing was casting doubt on Aristotelian mechanics -- he challenged the monopoly on scientific education enjoyed by university clerics who had, so he thought, learned nothing since their earliest encounter with Aristotle.

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Around 1609 Galileo had news of a development from Holland -- a lens grinder had taken two lenses and placed them at opposite ends of a metal tube. A rudimentary telescope was the result. Galileo made his own telescope as well as a compound microscope. Galileo directed all of his attention to the heavens. He was the first man to see craters on the moon, sun spots and the rings of Saturn. He also observed the phases of Venus. He determined that the Earth's moon was not a source of light but rather of reflected light. He saw the moons of Jupiter. And of course, Galileo was also a Copernican: "Sol est centrum mundi, est omnio immobile motu locali," ("The sun is the center of the universe and the earth moves.")

In 1611, Galileo packed his brass telescope in his bag and decided to go to Rome. The previous year, Galileo had reported his findings in his book, The Starry Messenger. Criticism of Galileo's observations began immediately. The authorities at Rome would not even look through his telescope. Why not? They had absolute faith in Aristotle. Not only that, if you think about it, the telescope reveals the existence of things which are not really there. Look at the heavenly body called Saturn with the naked eye. Do you see its rings? Of course not. In Galileo's day, seeing something that could not be seen with the naked eye was the same thing seeing apparitions or hearing voices -- it was the work of the Devil! The religious authorities at Rome were uneasy with the New Science. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo seemed to be turning the world upside down. The sun was the center of the cosmos, the earth moved and the sky seemed to hold hidden visions. In effect, the Scientific Revolution had created an invisible world behind the visible world and those men of an older generation, weaned on Aristotle and Aquinas were fearful of it.

On April 12, 1615, Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621) wrote his famous Letter To Foscarini, a letter which expressed his displeasure with Copernican theory. The following year, Galileo was summoned to Rome and ordered to desist teaching Copernican theory. He was, however, free to think about Copernican theory, but he could not teach it or write about it. Galileo agreed to this condition but still maintained that his mechanical philosophy described the natural world better than any alternative explanation. He was confident, extremely confident, that his position was the correct one. So confident was Galileo that in 1632 he imagined that the decree regarding his public advocacy of Copernican theory could be overturned. He began to criticize the clergy,

who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from their very pulpits with unwanted confidence, thus doing impious and inconsiderate injury not only to that doctrine and its followers but to all mathematics and mathematicians in general.

The new science, so though Galileo correctly, was unsuited to pulpit discussion. In fact, Galileo was more than aware of this necessity and in the defense of the new science, we can see the first stage of a century long struggle between faith and reason.

The new science was also unfit for public discussion. On the one hand, as a practical man with an eye toward the applicability of science, Galileo knew that the new science could improve the human condition. On the other hand, however, he argued that it was necessary not to allow the public too much knowledge regarding the motions of the heavenly bodies -- at the very least, the public mind ought to be enlightened slowly and cautiously:

The shallow minds of the common people must be protected from the truth about the universe lest they should become confused and obstinate in yielding assent to the principle articles that are absolutely matters of faith.

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In Galileo's mind, the new science was a body of knowledge intended for the learned elite. It was not intended for public consumption.

Furthermore, Galileo argued, the new science did not contradict the deeper meanings of the Holy Scriptures. The wise man should seek the true sense of the Scriptures, the true meaning. But, in matters of physical problems, we ought not begin from the authority of Scriptural passages but from sense experience and necessary demonstrations: in a word, natural philosophy. Aristotle had not observed enough, nor as freely as Church authorities believed and so Galileo and the rest of his fellow revolutionaries went beyond The Philosopher -- they had done a much better job of using their senses. By arguing that man must look beyond the literal meaning of the Scriptures, Galileo unwisely put himself in disagreement with Council of Trent. In 1546, the Council prohibited "any attempt to twist the sense of Holy Scripture against the meaning which has been and is being held by our Holy Mother Church." The Council, of course, was clearly reacting to the onslaught of the Lutheran Reformation. The medieval synthesis had been assaulted on several fronts but in one last ditch effort, Rome built its last defense -- Galileo was the fall guy!

In 1623, Galileo's friend and admirer Maffeo Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII (1568-1644). An intelligent but vain man, Barberini had much in common with Galileo -- both men considered themselves above the common man. Galileo enjoyed six audiences with Baberini and was rewarded with lavish gifts from him. Galileo reasoned that the time was now right to publish a new defense of Copernican theory. His confidence at an all time high, he spent four years composing the new Copernican manifesto. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, was cleared by Church censors, one of whom was Galileo's former student, and was published at Florence in 1632. As the title suggests, Galileo grounded his manifesto in the form of a dialogue rather than a treatise. The dialogue, Galileo reasoned, was a device through which an argument for Copernican theory could be made without violating the papal decree of 1616. Two of the conversants -- Salviati and Sagredo -- are sympathetic to Copernican theory. Simplicio, the third participant, represents Aristotle and the Scholastics and is presented as fool. Galileo's enemies were quick to inform the Pope that the official cosmology of the Roman Catholic Church had been put in the mouth of Simplicio. The Pope ordered an investigation and so in August 1632, less than six months after it had appeared, the Inquisition banned further sales of the book. Galileo's book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books and there it remained until 1757.

Galileo was ordered to appear before the Inquisition at Rome. He awaited intervention by the Pope, his former friend, but it never came. He also believed, quite innocently, that he could show that Copernicanism was not in any direct opposition to Church dogma, However, as Galileo found out, what was at issue was not so much heliocentricity but authority. Galileo quickly realized what was at stake. The now seventy year old Galileo was interrogated relentlessly and threatened with torture. The Church had a strong defense -- it was clear that Galileo had violated the prohibition placed upon him in 1616. He could believe Copernican theory but not publicly defend it. To prove their position, the Church produced the forged minutes of Galileo's meeting with Cardinal Bellarmine in 1616. Unfortunately for Galileo, by 1632, Bellarmine was dead. The document produced by the Church was clearly forged. It acknowledged that Galileo could not hold, teach or defend Copernican theory in any way. This was a much stronger prohibition than Galileo could recollect. (See the Galileo Trial Documents) Without a defense of any kind, Galileo took his only reasonable option and on June 22, 1633, he recited the required abjuration on his knees:

Wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and of every true Christian this vehement suspicion justly cast upon me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I do abjure,

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damn, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally each and every other error, heresy and sect contrary to the Holy Church; and I do swear for the future that I shall never again speak or assert, orally or in writing, such things as might bring me under similar suspicion.

The trial at an end, the abjuration made public, the broken Galileo spent his remaining eight years under house arrest at his villa outside Florence. It was at this time that he wrote perhaps his finest book, the Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, a study of motion and inertia. His eldest daughter, Sister Marie Celeste (1600-1634), whom he had sent to a convent against her wishes twenty-three years earlier, stayed with him to the end. Every day she said the seven Psalms of penitence ordered by the Holy Office as part of his sentence.

Galileo continued to gaze at the stars through his telescope until 1637, when his sight finally failed him. "This universe that I have extended one thousand times," he wrote, "has now shrunk to the narrow confines of my own body." The trial and condemnation of Galileo marked the climax of the first wave of the Scientific Revolution. He had helped to unlock some of the mysteries of the cosmos for his fellow man.

However, his trial also signified something else. The weight of papal authority which had brought Galileo to his knees also succeeded in halting the growth of the new science in Italy. It is no accident then, that following Galileo's death in 1642 that the greatest advances in science would come from outside Italy in countries like England, Holland and Germany. These were, after all, Protestant countries with a tradition of protest and toleration. But 1642 also signifies something else for it was in that year that the man most responsible for producing modern science was born. That man was Isaac Newton.

We can't imagine that the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries took place in a vacuum. That is, we can't assume that modern science simply came to be in a momentary flash of brilliance, nor that Copernicus or Kepler or Galileo just woke up one morning and pronounced their discoveries to a world which became somehow instantaneously different. Past historians have looked at the history of modern science from precisely this point of view. Like the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution has been interpreted as explosive, a surge forward, a watershed. On this score, John Herman Randall once remarked that:

One gathers, indeed, from our standard histories of the sciences, written mostly in the last generation, that the world lay steeped in the darkness and night of superstition, till one day Copernicus bravely cast aside the errors of his fellows, looked at the heavens and observed nature, the first man since the Greeks to do so, and discovered . . . the truth about the solar system. The next day, so to speak, Galileo climbed the leaning Tower of Pisa, dropped down his weights, and as they thudded to the ground, Aristotle was crushed to earth and the laws of falling bodies sprang into being. [The Career of Philosophy, vol 1, 1962]

The scientists of the seventeenth century -- those mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers -- had the enormous weight of centuries of thought resting on their shoulders. Even Isaac Newton was aware of the debt he owed to the past. Although this tradition was based largely on the work of Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas and Dante, the scientific revolutionaries sought to break free from these traditional beliefs. They had to forge a new identity. The scientific revolutionaries needed to transcend Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy or Aquinas -- this was their conscious decision. They not

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only criticized but replaced the medieval world view with their own. And this quest for identity would culminate in a world view that was scientific, mathematical, methodological and mechanical.

However, this revolution was accomplished by utilizing the medieval roots of science which, in turn, meant the science of the classical age of Greece and Rome as well as the refinements to that science made by Islamic scholars. They used what they found at hand to create a new outlook on the cosmos, the natural world and ultimately, the world of man. The antecedents to this revolution in thought are found in the 11th and 12th centuries when most of the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers were wed together into a new body of beliefs. These beliefs were living and vital. We encounter them in the 12th century Renaissance. We find them at the school of Chartres in the mid-12th century, or at the medical school at Salerno near Naples in 1060. At Toledo in Spain, 92 Arabic works had been translated along with Ptolemy in 1175. By the 12th century, Arabic science and mathematics had found its way to Oxford in England and to Padua in Italy. From the early 12th century, then, there existed in Europe a continuous tradition of scientific endeavor. And although this science was temporarily overshadowed by the intellectual bulk of Aristotle in the mid-13th century, this tradition was living in the 15th and 16th centuries and well into the 17th. (See my Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History, especially Lectures 23-28.)

This was the background and education of the scientific revolutionaries. We must see their discoveries as shaped and formed by this core of accepted ideas and not just spinning out of empty space. The revolution in science did not occur quickly. It developed over time. Although the medieval Church earned absolute power, authority and obedience, science and scientific thinking did flourish during the five centuries preceding that watershed we call the Scientific Revolution.

By the 17th century, science, scientific thinking and the experimental method had become the territory of more men, and by the mid-18th century, increasing numbers of women would be included as well. For instance, in 1649 René Descartes yielded, after much hesitation, to the requests of Queen Christina of Sweden that he join the distinguished circle she was assembling in Stockholm and personally instruct her in philosophy.

The New Science spread rapidly through education in universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Padua and Paris. Science was also diffused to a large audience through books. Each time a Galileo, Descartes, or Newton published their findings, a wave of replies followed. And each of these replies was followed by other replies so that what quickly resulted was an ever growing body of scientific literature. And, of course, there was at the same time, an increasing number of men and women who were eager for such knowledge.

By the end of the 17th century, new societies and academies devoted to science were founded. There were many who agreed with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) that scientific work ought to be a collective enterprise, pursued cooperatively by all its practitioners. Information should be exchanged so that scientists could concentrate on different parts of a project rather than waste time in duplicate research. Although it was not the first such academy, the Royal Society in England was perhaps the first permanent organization dedicated to scientific activity. The Royal Society was founded at Oxford during the English Civil War when revolutionaries captured the city and replaced many teachers at the university. A few of these revolutionaries formed the Invisible College, a group that met to exchange information and ideas. What was most important was the organization itself, not its results: the group only included one scientist, Robert Boyle (1627-1691). In 1660, twelve members, including Boyle and Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), formed an official organization,

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the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. In 1662, the Society was granted its charter by Charles II.

The purpose of the Royal Society was Baconian to the core. Its aim was to gather all knowledge about nature, particularly that knowledge which might be useful for the public good. Soon it became clear, however, that the Society's principal function was to serve as a clearing center for research. The Society maintained correspondence and encouraged foreign scholars to submit their discoveries to the Society. In 1665 the Society launched its Philosophical Transactions, the first professional scientific journal. The English example was followed on the continent as well: in 1666 Louis XIV accepted the founding of the French Royal Academy of Sciences and by 1700, similar organizations were established in Naples and Berlin.

The New Science was also diffused by public demonstrations. This was especially the case in public anatomy lessons. Scientist and layman alike were invited to witness the dissection of human cadavers. The body of a criminal would be brought to the lecture hall and the surgeon would dissect the body, announcing and displaying organs as they were removed from the body.

Throughout major European cities there were wealthy men who, with lots of free time on their hands, would dabble in science. These were the virtuosi -- the amateur scientists. These men oftentimes made original contributions to scientific endeavor. They also supplied organizations like the Royal Society with needed funds.

By 1700, science had become an issue of public discourse. The bottom line, I suppose, was that science worked! It was wonderful, miraculous and spectacular. For the 17th century scientist -- a Galileo, a Newton or the virtuosi -- science produced the Baconian vision that anything was indeed possible. Science itself gave an immense boost to the general European belief in human progress, a belief perhaps initiated by the general awakening of European thought in the 12th century.

It was the achievement of men like Copernicus and Galileo to sift through centuries of scientific knowledge and to create a new world view. This was a world view based as much on previous

science and knowledge as it was on new developments derived from the scientific method.

The greatest scientific achievement of the 17th century was clearly the mathematical system of the universe produced by Isaac Newton (1642-1727). It was Newton who went far beyond Galileo by taking observations of the heavens and turning them into measured and irrefutable fact. Thanks to Newton, the western intellectual tradition would now include a concrete and scientific explanation of the motion of the heavens. Because of his greatness, the 17th century could almost be called the Age of Newton.

Newton was in his own lifetime not regarded as a genius by his contemporaries. His fellow scientists respected him and admired him but they also disliked him. The reason is clear -- Newton was not a happy man. He was dour, sour and made absolutely no

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attempt to befriend anyone. Whenever someone happened to get too close to him, he retired to his study. His thoroughgoing Puritanism meant that he constantly subjected himself to self-examination.

Isaac Newton was born premature on Christmas Day, 1642, the year of Galileo's death. His family belonged to the gentry. He was educated at Cambridge and was also a member and president of the Royal Society. Although the Society was responsible for the publication of his major writings, his relationships with its members was strained. In the 25-30 years that Newton was a member he attended its meetings only a handful of times. In terms of religion he accepted the Church of England only partially. Over time, he came to see the Bible more as an allegory than as undisputed fact.

He was an unlikable man -- a solitary genius. He worked in short bursts of energy and was always hesitant to publish his findings. He had to be coaxed and encouraged to make those simplifications necessary to communicate a considerable body of thought. He quarreled violently with those men (e.g., Robert Hooke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Flamstead) who questioned his priority and superiority in fields he dominated.

Modern biographers have pretty much agreed that Newton -- our "sober, silent, thinking lad" -- suffered a troubled childhood. His father died in early October 1642, a month before Isaac was born. For the first three years of his life he was sent out to a wet nurse and then lived with his grandmother. During this time his mother remarried, an act that did much to alienate Newton from his mother. As a child, Newton was never shown much love or affection. This may explain why he was always so isolated, detached and unemotional.

Between 1660 and 1690, Newton devoted himself to an academic life at Cambridge. As the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics he was expected to lecture on a weekly basis, lectures which he frequently delivered to empty classrooms. He embraced a number of academic interests but the ones which interested him most were alchemy, theology, optics and mathematics. No field of study took precedence over another and he so he devoted as much of his energy and intellect to alchemy as he did to theology and mathematics.

Like most scholars of the period, Newton had an amanuensis, a young student named Humphrey Newton, who served him as an assistant who provided Newton with meals as well as transcriptions of his lecture notes. Newton was an absent-minded man. Stories of Newton's behavior are, of course, well known. Newton was a deliberate thinker, always hesitant to publish, always hesitant to move too quickly. A call to dinner might have taken Newton an hour to act upon. If, on his way to sup, his fancy was struck by some book lying on the table, the meal would simply have to wait. He ate poorly, slept irregularly and for the most part found the outside world a terrible irritant from which he needed to escape. As Humphrey Newton once wrote:

I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime either in riding out to take the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that was not spent in his studies, to which he kept so close that he seldom left his chamber unless at term time, when he read in the schools as being Lucasianus Professor, where so few went to hear him, and fewer understood him, that ofttimes he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls. . . . So intent, so serious upon his studies that he ate very sparingly, nay, ofttimes he has forgot to eat at all, so that, going into his chamber, I have found his mess untouched, of which, when I have reminded him, he would reply -- "Have I!" and then making to the table, would eat a bit or two

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standing, for I cannot say I ever saw him sit at table by himself. . . . he very rarely went to bed till two or three of the clock, sometimes not until five or six, lying about four or five hours, especially at spring or fall of the leaf, at which times he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarcely going out either night or day; he sitting up, one night as I did another, till he had finished his chemical experiments, in the performances of which he was the most accurate, strict, exact. What his aim might be I was not able to penetrate into, but his pains, his diligence at those set times made me think he aimed at something beyond the reach of human art and industry. [quoted in Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968), p. 105.]

In 1687, Newton finished his greatest work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), the last "great" work in the western intellectual tradition to be published in Latin. It was this work, commonly called the Principia, which secured Newton's place as one of the greatest thinkers in the intellectual history of Europe. The Principia is a dense work, but not totally incomprehensible. He wanted to explain why the planets were held in their orbits -- he wanted to know why an apple fell to the earth. His answer was, of course, gravity. Newton not only described the laws which explained gravity, he also invented the calculus to explain the laws of gravity.

Even for those people who could not understand Newtonian physics or mathematics, Newton had an amazing impact, since he had offered irrefutable proof -- mathematical proof -- that Nature had order and meaning, an order and meaning that was not based on faith but on human Reason. With Newton, we find the important combination of two important concepts -- Nature and Reason. His scientific discoveries and his spirit (together with the ideas of Francis Bacon and John Locke) dominated the thought of the 18th century -- a century the thinkers of the period itself called the Age of Enlightenment.

On March 20, 1727, Newton died and was buried at Westminster Abbey. The English poet, Alexander Pope (1688-1744), who was then busy translating Homer's Iliad, composed an epitaph for Newton. It was short and precise and illustrates the importance of this solitary genius. Pope wrote:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

How can it be that a poet who was then translating Homer, should come to write Newton's epitaph? Was Pope also a mathematician? Hardly. The point is that Pope knew that Newton had discovered something which would in the 18th century become universally applicable to the new science of man. If man, using his Reason, could deduce the laws of Nature, then it seemed only a short step to apply those laws to man and society. Is it any accident that the modern social sciences were founded in the 18th century and in the wake of Newton's achievement?

The Scientific Revolution gave the western world the impression that the human mind was progressing toward some ultimate end. Thanks to the culminating work of Newton, the western intellectual tradition now included a firm belief in the idea of human progress, that is, that man's history could be identified as the progressive unfolding of man's capacity for perfectibility. From

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this point on, man the believer was now joined by man the knower. It was man's destiny to both know the world, and create that world.

But, the Scientific Revolution also showed man to be merely a small part of a larger divine plan. Man no longer found himself at the center of the universe -- he was now simply a small part of a much greater whole. The French thinker Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), gave perhaps the greatest expression to the uncertainties generated by the Scientific Revolution when, in his Pensées, he wrote:

For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an absolute in comparison with nothing, a central point between nothing and all. Infinitely far from understanding these extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he came, and the infinite in which he is engulfed. What else then will he perceive but some appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their principle of their purpose? All things emerge from nothing and are borne onwards to infinity. Who can follow this marvelous process? The Author of these wonders understands them. None but he can.

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