Scientific revolution

"The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology, infinite in Duration as well as Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance with eternal and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only those — all the others the departed God took with him... The Divine Artifex had therefore less and less to do in the world. He did not even have to conserve it, as the world, more and more, became able to dispense with this service..."

"There is something for which Newton — or better to say not Newton alone, but modern science in general — can still be made responsible: it is splitting of our world in two. I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth, and that it united and unified the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world — the world of quantity, or reified geometry, a world in which, though there is place for everything, there is no place for man. Thus the world of science — the real world — became estranged and utterly divorced from the world of life, which science has been unable to explain — not even to explain away by calling it "subjective"."

"Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe... I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself with us. ...After having brought you up to date on what is happening in chemistry, it would be well to speak to you about our political revolution. We regard it as done and without any possibility of return to the old order."

"He [ Kepler ] supposes, in that treatise [epitome of astronomy], that the motion of the sun on his axis is preserved by some inherent vital principle; that a certain virtue, or immaterial image of the sun, is diffused with his rays into the ambient spaces, and, revolving with the body of the sun on his axis, takes hold of the planets and carries them along with it in the same direction; as a load-stone turned round in the neighborhood of a magnetic needle makes it turn round at the same time. The planet, according to him, by its inertia endeavors to continue in its place, and the action of the sun's image and this inertia are in a perpetual struggle. He adds, that this action of the sun, like to his light, decreases as the distance increases; and therefore moves the same planet with greater celerity when nearer the sun, than at a greater distance. To account for the planet's approaching towards the sun as it descends from the aphelium to the perihelium, and receding from the sun while it ascends to the aphelium again, he supposes that the sun attracts one part of each planet, and repels the opposite part; and that the part which is attracted is turned towards the sun in the descent, and that the other part is towards the sun in the ascent. By suppositions of this kind he endeavored to account for all the other varieties of the celestial motions."

"In the opinion of one of the most eminent modem naturalists, it was Boyle who opened up those chemical inquiries, which went on accumulating until, a century later, they supplied the means by which Lavoisier and his contemporaries fixed the real basis of chemistry, and enabled it for the first time to take its proper stand among those sciences that deal with the external world."

"We offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this—from the phænomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phænomena; and to this end the general propositions in the first and second book are directed. In the third book we give an example of this in the explication of the System of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the first book, we there derive from the celestial phænomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets. Then from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea."

"The researches of Galileo, followed up by Huygens and others, led to those modern conceptions of Force and Law, which have revolutionized the intellectual world. The great attention given to mechanics in the seventeenth century soon so emphasized these conceptions as to give rise to the Mechanical Philosophy, a doctrine that all the phenomena of the physical universe are to be explained upon mechanical principles. Newton's great discovery imparted a new impetus to this tendency. The old notion that heat consists in an agitation of corpuscles was now applied as an explanation to the chief properties of gases. The first suggestion in this direction was that the pressure of gases is explained by the battering of the particles against the walls of the containing vessel, which explained Boyle's law of the compressibility of air. Later, the expansion of gases, Avogadro's chemical law, the diffusion and viscosity of gases, and the action of Crooke's radiometer were shown to be consequences of the same kinetical theory; but other phenomena, such as the ratio of the specific heat at constant volume to that at constant pressure, require additional hypotheses, which we have little reason to suppose are simple, so that we find ourselves quite afloat. In like manner with regard to light..."

"Most authors were led to identify the birth of scientific method with what, not by accident, is called the Scientific Renaissance, and that until the nineteenth century the civilization that gave us science was not even considered worthy of that name: it was just a "period of decadence" of Greek civilization."

"The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. … The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric."

"Not only can any given theory be proven wrong... sooner or later it probably will be. And when it is, the occasion will mark the success of science, not its failure. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it."

"This is another important dispute in the history of how we think about being wrong: whether error represents an obstacle in the path toward truth, or the path itself. The former idea is a conventional one. The latter... emerged during the Scientific Revolution and continued to evolve throughout the Enlightenment. But it didn't really reach its zenith until the early nineteenth century, when... Pierre Simon Laplace refined the distribution of errors, illustrated by the now-familiar bell curve. ...Laplace used the bell curve to determine the precise orbit of the planets. ...By using the normal distribution to graph... individually imperfect data points, Laplace was able to generate a far more precise picture of the galaxy. ...aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth."

"Newton proposed that the particles of the air (we would call them molecules), were motionless in space and were held apart by repulsive forces between them... He assumed that the repulsive force was inversely proportional to the distance between the particles...He showed that, on the basis of this assumption, a collection of static particles in a box would behave exactly as Boyle had found. His model led directly to Boyle's law. Probably the greatest scientist ever, Newton managed to get the right answer from a model that was wrong in every possible way."

"The Hon. Robert Boyle... in the third volume of the folio edition of his work, is a paper having the following title, "That the Goods of Mankind may be much Increased by the Naturalist's Insight into Trades." This paper contains... the first attempt at a philosophical recognition of the value and importance of the industrial arts of mankind. In it we recognise the early effort of a man of science seeking to call the attention of the learned and great of his time to what he aptly denominates the Natural History of Trades. ...He contends that the benefit accruing from such an inquiry would be mutual, both to the learned in natural knowledge, and to the skilled in industrial art."

"The founders of modern science - for instance, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton - were mostly pious men who did not doubt God’s purposes. Nevertheless they took the revolutionary step of consciously and deliberately expelling the idea of purpose as controlling nature from their new science of nature. They did this on the ground that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events. To predict an eclipse, what you have to know is not its purpose but its causes. Hence science from the seventeenth century onwards became exclusively an inquiry into causes. The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned on. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world."

"By analyzing the measurements of , Johannes Kepler established that planetary motions weren't circles but ellipses... Through his telescopes, Galileo saw that the Sun had its perfection tarnished by ugly black spots. And the Moon wasn't a perfect sphere but looked like a place, complete with mountains and giant craters. So why didn't it fall down? Isaac Newton finally answered... by exploring... [a radical] idea... that heavenly objects obey the same laws as objects here on Earth. ...Newton ...realized that ...the fate of a horizontally fired cannon ball depends on its speed: it crashes to the ground only if its speed is below some magic value. ...[W]ith ever higher speeds, they'll travel farther ...before landing ...until ...they keep their height over the ground ...constant and never land, merely orbiting ...just like the Moon! Since he knew the strength of gravity near the Earth's surface... he was able to calculate the magic speed... 7.9 kilometers per second. Assuming the Moon... was obeying the same laws... he could similarly predict what speed it needed... Moreover, since the Moon took one month to travel around a circle whose circumference Aristarchos had figured out, Newton already knew its speed... Now he made a remarkable discovery: if he assumed that the force of gravity weakened like the inverse square... then this magical speed that would give the Moon a circular orbit exactly matched its measured speed! He had discovered the law of gravity... applying not merely here on Earth, but in the heavens as well. ...People boldly extrapolated not only to the macrocosmos... but also to the microcosmos, finding that many properties... could be explained by applying to... atoms... The scientific revolution had begun."

"Newton did not show the cause of the apple falling, but he shewed a similitude between the apple and the stars. By doing so he turned old facts into new knowledge; and was well content if he could bring diverse phenomenon under "two or three Principles of Motion" even "though the Causes of these Principles were not yet discovered.""

"Gilbert, in his work, De Magnete printed in 1600 has only some vague notions that the magnetic virtue of the earth in some way determines the direction of the earth's axis, the rate of its diurnal rotation, and that of the revolution of the moon about it. Gilbert died in 1603, and in his posthumous work (De Mundo nostro Sublunari Philosophia nova, 1631) we have already a more distinct statement of the attraction of one body by another. "The force which emanates from the moon reaches to the earth, and, in like manner, the magnetic virtue of the earth pervades the region of the moon: both correspond and conspire by the joint action of both, according to a proportion and conformity of motions, but the earth has more effect in consequence of its superior mass; the earth attracts and repels, the moon, and the moon within certain limits, the earth; not so as to make the bodies come together, as magnetic bodies do, but so that they may go on in a continuous course." Though this phraseology is capable of representing a good deal of the truth, it does not appear to have been connected... with any very definite notions of mechanical action in detail."

"The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method—the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically—the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts."

"The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir."

"The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader."

"During the Middle Ages the universe was regarded as finite, with the earth at its centre. The idea was abandoned during the Scientific Renaissance, and the universe came to be pictured as an indefinitely large number of stars scattered throughout infinite Euclidean space. This conception appeared to be a necessary consequence of the theory of gravitation; for, as Newton pointed out, a finite material universe in infinite space would tend to concentrate in one massive lump."

"The Propositions that are insisted on in this Discourse. PROP. I. That the seeming Novelty and Singularity of this Opinion, can be no sufficient Reason to prove it Erroneus. PROP. II. That the places of Scripture, which seem to intimate the Diurnal Motion of the Sun, or Heavens, are fairly capable of another interpretation. PROP. III. That the Holy Ghost, in many places of Scripture, does plainly conform his Expressions to the Error of our Conceits, and does not speak of sundry things as they are in themselves, but as they appear unto us. PROP. IV. That divers learned Men have fallen into great Absurdities, whilst they have looked for the Grounds of Philosophy from the Words of Scripture. PROP. V. That the words of Scripture, in their proper and strict construction, do not any where affirm the Immobility of the Earth. PROP. VI. That there is not any Argument from the words of Scripture, Principles of Nature, or Observations in Astronomy, which can sufficiently evidence the Earth to be in the Centre of the Universe. PROP. VII. 'Tis probable that the Sun is the Centre of the World. PROP. VIII. That there is not any sufficient reason to prove the Earth incapable of those Motions which Copernicus ascribes unto it. PROP. IX. That it is more probable that the Earth does move, than the Heavens. PROP. X. That this Hypothesis is exactly agreeable to common Appearances."

"'Tis in Philosophy, and that is made up of nothing else; but receives addition from every days experiment. True indeed, for Divinity we have an infallible rule that do's plainly inform us of all necessary Truths; and therefore the Primitive Times are of greater Authority, because they were nearer to those holy Men who were the Pen-Men of Scripture. But now for Philosophy, there is no such reason: What ever the School Men may talk; yet Aristotles works are not necessarily true, and he himself hath by sufficient Arguments proved himself to be liable unto errour. Now in this case, if we should speak properly, Antiquity do's consist in the old age of the World, not in the youth of it. In such Learning as may be increased by fresh experiments and new discoveries: 'Tis we are the Fathers, and of more Authority than former Ages; because we have the advantage of more time than they had, and Truth (we say) is the Daughter of Time."