16th and 17th centuries
1. The term scientific revolution - itself not even used before the 1930s- was coined by historians when the academic world believed and relied on the existence of a coherent and catalysmic event that irrevocably and fundamentally changed what people knew about the natural world. This was seen as the moment at which the world was made modern. Historians called it the most profound achievement of the human mind. As such it outshone everything since the rise of Christianity and that Renaisssance and reformation were nothing compared to it.
2. The idea of revolution first in science and then in political life came after the Enlightenment as the people of the 18th century believed that they were doing something very radical about the ancien regime.
3. Today: a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural environment. The continuity of the medieval past and natural philosophy together with no practice of a universal science method is more and more accepted. So instead we need to look at the aspects of the changes in knowledge about the natural world and changes in means in securing that knowledge.
4. From Copernicus’s new astronomy in the 16th century to Newton in the 17th century. The stages of this are:
mechanization of nature, using mechanical metaphors to explain nature
separating experiencing nature from viewing what nature is really like: depersonalization of knowledge about nature
formulating rules of method to take out human emotion – objevtivity
assuming that this reformed knowledge of nature is benign, powerful and disinterested so that it can be used in social and political life as well.
PRACTITIONERS
Copernicus: Heliocentric Theory (sun-centered astronomy)
Tycho Brahe and his sister Sophia: mid-16th to 17th century, movement of planets around the sun
Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630, Planetary motion and optics
Galileo Galilei 1564-1642, telescope
Descartes, 1596-1650, ‘I think therefore I am’
Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, gravity
