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Scientific Revolution: Sciences
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This unit seeks to analyze the origins of the Scientific Revolution in Europe. It will concentrate on the steps that led Europeans to change their view of the universe and abandon Classical science. It will investigate the development of the scientific method which provided a dynamic new mechanism for gathering and exploiting knowledge. And it will examine the impact of these new discoveries on European thought, religion, and society. Finally, this unit will suggest why the Scientific Revolution began in Europe rather than Asia or the Americas, and why the Scientific Revolution paved the way for the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the scientific orientation of modern societies today.
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Not only the content but the practices of science changed during the Scientific Revolution. Scientific institutions spread across Europe, developing from temporary and informal groups into the permanent institutions founded in the 1660s, the English Royal Society and the French Royal Academy of Sciences. Periodicals, lectures and demonstrations brought news of the new science to a broad public. The world of Nicholas Copernicus, toiling in his lonely study and circulating manuscripts among a few peers, gave way to the far more familiar world of Edmond Halley, promoter, editor, civil servant, sea captain, and the scientist who established that comets follow recurring paths around the sun.
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If the historians' concept of a scientific revolution remains indispensable for understanding the origins of modern science, it raises another important set of historiographical issues. Why did the scientific revolution occur when it did (at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the early modern period)? Why did it occur only in western Europe? More to the point, why did it not occur in ancient Greece, early imperial China, medieval Islam, or Byzantium, where there is enough historical evidence to suggest it might have occurred? To what extent was the scientific revolution responsible for the subsequent cultural dominance of the West? Debates on these issues continue in the twenty-first century.
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[One] important factor in the scientific revolution was the rise of learned societies and academies in various countries. The earliest of these were in Italy and Germany and were short-lived. More influential were the Royal Society in England (1660) and the Academy of Sciences in France (1666). The former was a private institution in London and included such scientists as Robert Hooke, John Wallis, William Brouncker, Thomas Sydenham, John Mayow, and Christopher Wren (who contributed not only to architecture but ... to astronomy and anatomy); the latter, in Paris, was a government institution and included as a foreign member the Dutchman Huygens. In the 18th cent. important royal academies were established at Berlin (1700) and at St. Petersburg (1724). The societies and academies provided the principal opportunities for the publication and discussion of scientific results during and after the scientific revolution.
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Like many revolutions, the scientific revolution laid the foundations for a new authority, that of science itself. Science became an ideological justification both for conserving and changing the social order. Thomas Hobbes sought to ground political sovereignty in the "mechanical philosophy," and political arithmeticians claimed to analyze human society quantitatively. Men used the latest scientific discoveries to support their power over women, and Europeans asserted on scientific grounds their superiorities over and right to rule the world's other peoples.
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Many people have tried to understand why the scientific revolution occurred when and where it did. Philosophical attempts to understand the workings of nature and the techniques of mathematical analysis reached astonishingly high levels of accomplishment among the ancient Greeks. During the Middle Ages it looked as though the civilization of Islam would build upon the Greek legacy, while Europeans ignored it. The Muslims made notable achievements in natural philosophy, chemistry, medicine, and mathematics. Meanwhile, science and technology in China were ... ahead of anything in Europe. During the 17th century, however, Western Europeans overtook everyone and went much further. Historians are still struggling to understand why the Western Europeans inaugurated the scientific revolution, rather than the Greeks, Muslims, or Chinese.
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