LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Scientific Revolution: Period
built 615 days ago
Which is to say, the Scientific Revolution provides an excellent exercise for thinking about how historical periodizations emerge, develop, and mature. Arguably, periodizations serve as paradigms, for students and scholars alike. They ... serve as a forum for debate. Good periodizations foster debate, and the best among them grow more richly problematic, they promote ever more focused research and ever more imaginative and satisfying interpretations of past events.
Source:
The scientific revolution is the historians' term and should be seen as a shorthand way of referring to a multitude of historical phenomena and processes, not all of which were directly related to one another. Although potentially misleading in so far as there were not, for example, defining moments when the revolution can be said to have begun or to have ended nor a recognizable body of revolutionaries who were all self-consciously affiliated with one another, it continues to be recognized as a valid label. The lengthy time span of this revolution might ... seem anomalous, but this is easily outweighed by the undeniable fact that approaches to natural knowledge in 1700 were completely different from those deployed in 1500 and that there is no exaggeration in calling these changes revolutionary. Those historians who have chosen to emphasize the undoubted continuities between the thought of the scientific revolution and medieval thought nevertheless concede that, by the end of the period, things were completely different from the way they had been at the beginning. It is perfectly possible, for example, to see Nicolaus Copernicus (1473รข€“1543), who first suggested that Earth was not stationary in the center of the universe but was revolving around the Sun, not as the first modern astronomer but as the last of the great medieval astronomers. Far from being an indefensible position, this is the only way to fully understand what Copernicus did and how he did it. Nevertheless it remains true to say that the switch from an Earth-centered universe to a Sun-centered planetary system had revolutionary consequences that cannot possibly be denied.
Source:
You might ask what this has to do with the Scientific Revolution. Well, when the ships of the explorers and discoverers started coming back from far-off lands, they brought many unusual things back with them. The thinkers of the time were rationalists, as you know, and depended upon the idea that any thing could be put in its proper category or universal, and that the laws governing these universals were permanent and unchanging and could be known with certainty. Imagine what some learned person of that period must have thought when some traveller returned from distant parts showed him one of the souvenir he had brought back -- a Venus flytrap. The thinker would have watched as the little plant caught a fly and sat back to digest its meal, and he would have thought about the categories of "plant" and "animal". There simply was no category of "carnivorous plant" into which he could place the Venus flytrap, and so he would have gone home to look for his drawing board because it was clear that something had to be done.
Source:
The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements, now known as the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution is traditionally held by most historians to have begun in 1543, when De Revolutionibus, by the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, was first printed. The thesis of this book was that the Earth moved around the Sun. The period culminated with the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Period