"I shall try to sum up the main obstacles which arrested the progress of science for such an immeasurable time. The first was the splitting of the world into two spheres, and the mental split which resulted from it. The second was the geocentric dogma, the blind eye turned on the promising line of thought which had started with the Pythagoreans and stopped abruptly with Aristarchus of Samos. The third was the dogma of uniform motion in perfect circles. The fourth was the divorcement of science from mathematics. The fifth was the inability to realize that a body at rest tended to stay at rest, a body in motion tended to stay in motion. The main achievement of the first part of the scientific revolution was the removal of these five cardinal obstacles. This was done chiefly by three men: Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. After that, the road was open to the Newtonian synthesis; from there on the journey led with rapidly gaining speed to the atomic age."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Scientific revolution
73 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Scientific revolution →
Related Quotes
"In... "The Portuguese Discoveries and the Rise of Modern Science", Prof. Hooykaas supported the thesis "That the Port…"
"The modern origins of empirical scientific knowledge lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This time period…"
"Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds…"
"Concerning ourselves we speak not; but as touching the matter which we have in hand, this we ask;—that men deem it no…"
"[L]ong ago have those doctrines been exploded of the Force of the First Mover and the Solidity of the Heaven,—the sta…"
"Though Lavoisier generally gets credit for the authorship of this principle [ conservation of mass ], others had conc…"
"In Newton's time only two kinds of force were available for quantitative investigation. One was the force of gravity;…"
"During medieval times, men accepted Ptolemy's view that the earth was the natural center of the universe. ...[A]dapti…"
"The credit of first using the telescope for astronomical purposes is almost invariably attributed to Galilei, though …"
"Galileo had the experience of beholding the heavens as they actually are for perhaps the first time, and wherever he …"