August 14, 2024

Sarah Nguyen

11th Grade

Fountain Valley High School

What is a revolution? A revolution can be defined as a sudden radical change or overthrow of one’s government. What made the Scientific Revolution so “revolutionary”? It was neither a sudden radical change nor an overthrow of the government. By its name you may infer that it was a sudden eruption of knowledge; however, the revolution was anything but far from sudden. The Scientific Revolution, occurring in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, was characterized by a surge of innovation and abstract reasoning. It spanned from about the end of The Renaissance to the beginning of The Enlightenment. This era represented a departure from medieval doctrines to an enthusiastic embrace of scientific thought and the exploration of the natural world. It marked a significant shift from reliance on religious authority or ancient texts, with scholars opting to apply reason to address fundamental questions. The Scientific revolution laid the groundwork for modern science.

What propelled the Scientific Revolution had been the discovery by Nicolas Copernicus that Earth was in fact, not the center of the universe. Copernicus proposed the first extensive heliocentric theory, the assumption that the sun was the center of the universe, contrasting the widely known Ptolemy theory, which stated that Earth was the center of the universe. The shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism, supported by Copernicus, Galileo, and Johannes Kepler revolutionized our understanding of the universe as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, three laws that described the orbits of the planets around the sun, and Galileo’s telescopic observations provided evidence to back heliocentrism up. Galileo’s observations proved to us that the moon had features just like Earth and was not just a smooth ball floating in space. 

Building upon these men emerged Isaac Newton. Many know of the legend of Newton and the apple tree, however, Newton did more than just suddenly come up with gravity after getting hit by an apple. A physicist and mathematician, Newton discovered calculus, proposed his three laws of motion, and laid the connection between light and color. In his book Principia, Newton provided solid evidence to back up Kepler’s Laws. Furthermore, Newton’s synthesis of earlier theories into a cohesive framework provided a new understanding of physical forces and motion, influencing science for centuries to come. He built upon the work of Descartes and utilized Galileo’s law of inertia in order to conceptualize his First Law of Motion. 

The Scientific Revolution era also saw important developments in medicine and biology. Andreas Vesalius’s detailed anatomical studies corrected long-standing misconceptions about human anatomy and were accurate. Vesalius is often known as the founder of modern anatomy. Additionally, William Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system revolutionized the understanding of human physiology. At the time, a majority of physicians believed that rather than the heart, it was the lungs that were responsible for pumping blood throughout the body. By experimenting on animals and removing beating hearts from living ones, he was able to prove this was not the case.

Moreover, before the revolution, chemistry and alchemy were often seen as one. However, this could be considered farthest from the truth. Alchemy aims to transform metals into gold, while chemistry is the scientific study of properties and the behavior of matter. The Scientific Revolution fundamentally transformed chemistry from a mystical and speculative practice into a rigorous and empirical science. Boyle's work on gasses and chemical elements, Lavoisier's establishment of the law of conservation of mass and systematic chemical nomenclature, and Priestley's discovery of oxygen marked significant advancements.

The most enduring legacy of the Scientific Revolution is the arguably scientific method, widely utilized as the foremost approach to problem-solving. During the 16th Century, the scientific method was popularized by Francis Bacon, who utilized inductive reasoning. It emphasized systematic observation, controlled experimentation, and the formation of a hypothesis.

Without the occurrence of the Scientific Revolution and the great minds that led it, the world we live in today would be immensely different. It is due to these thinkers and their developments that allows for the modern science we have today to flourish.