ILOILO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY MODULE 2

GE 7 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY LESSON 4

PARADIGM SHIFT AND
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th Century

https://www.britannica.com/science/Scientific-Revolution

The Scientific Revolution is a drastic change in scientific thought that took

place during the 16th and 17th centuries.

A new view of nature emerged during the Scientific Revolution, replacing the
Greek view that had dominated science for almost 2,000 years. Science became
an autonomous discipline, distinct from both philosophy and technology, and it came
to be regarded as having utilitarian goals.

By the end of this period, it may not be too much to say that science had
replaced Christianity as the focal point of European civilization. Out of the ferment of
the Renaissance and Reformation there arose a new view of science, bringing about
the following transformations: the reeducation of common sense in favour of abstract
reasoning; the substitution of a quantitative for a qualitative view of nature; the view
of nature as a machine rather than as an organism; the development of an
experimental, scientific method that sought definite answers to certain limited
questions couched in the framework of specific theories; and the acceptance of
new criteria for explanation, stressing the “how” rather than the “why” that had
characterized the Aristotelian search for final causes.

The growing flood of information that resulted from the Scientific Revolution
put heavy strains upon old institutions and practices. It was no longer sufficient to
publish scientific results in an expensive book that few could buy; information had to
be spread widely and rapidly.

Natural philosophers had to be sure of their data, and to that end they
required independent and critical confirmation of their discoveries. New means were
created to accomplish these ends. Scientific societies sprang up, beginning in Italy in
the early years of the 17th century and culminating in the two great national scientific
societies that mark the zenith of the Scientific Revolution: the Royal Society of
London for Improving Natural Knowledge, created by royal charter in 1662, and
the Académie des Sciences of Paris, formed in 1666.

In these societies and others like them all over the world, natural
philosophers could gather to examine, discuss, and criticize new discoveries and old
theories. To provide a firm basis for these discussions, societies began to publish
scientific papers. The old practice of hiding new discoveries in private jargon,
obscure language, or even anagrams gradually gave way to the ideal of universal
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SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

comprehensibility. New canons of reporting were devised so that experiments and

discoveries could be reproduced by others. This required new precision in language
and a willingness to share experimental or observational methods. The failure of
others to reproduce results cast serious doubts upon the original reports. Thus were
created the tools for a massive assault on nature’s secrets.

Astronomy
The Scientific Revolution began in Astronomy. Although there had been
earlier discussions of the possibility of Earth’s motion,the Polish astronomer Nicolaus
Copernicus was the first to propsed a comprehensive heliocentric theory equal in
scope and predictive capability to Ptolemy’s geocentric system.

Motivated by the desire to satisfy Plato’s dictum, Copernicus was led to

overthrow traditional astronomy because of its alleged violation of the principle
of uniform circular motion and its lack of unity and harmony as a system of the world.
Relying on virtually the same data as Ptolemy had possessed, Copernicus turned
the world inside out, putting the Sun at the centre and setting Earth into motion
around it. Copernicus’s theory, published in 1543, possessed a qualitative simplicity
that Ptolemaic astronomy appeared to lack. To achieve comparable levels of
quantitative precision, however, the new system became just as complex as the old.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Copernican astronomy lay in Copernicus’s
attitude toward the reality of his theory. In contrast to Platonic instrumentalism,
Copernicus asserted that to be satisfactory astronomy must describe the real,
physical system of the world.

The reception of Copernican astronomy amounted to victory by infiltration. By

the time large-scale opposition to the theory had developed in the church and
elsewhere, most of the best professional astronomers had found some aspect of
order of the new system indispensable. Copernicus’s book De revolutionibus orbium
coelestium libri VI (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”),
published in 1543, became a standard reference for advanced problems in
astronomical research, particularly for its mathematical techniques. Thus, it was
widely read by mathematical astronomers, in spite of its central cosmological
hypothesis, which was widely ignored.

In 1551 the German astronomer Erasmus Reinhold published the Tabulae

prutenicae (“Prutenic Tables”), computed by Copernican methods. The tables were
more accurate and more up-to-date than their 13th-century predecessor and became
indispensable to both astronomers and astrologers.

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SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

During the 16th century the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, rejecting both
the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, was responsible for major changes in
observation, unwittingly providing the data that ultimately decided the argument in
favour of the new astronomy. Using larger, stabler, and better calibrated instruments,
he observed regularly over extended periods, thereby obtaining a continuity of
observations that were accurate for planets to within about one minute of
arc—several times better than any previous observation. Several of Tycho’s
observations contradicted Aristotle’s system: a nova that appeared in 1572 exhibited
no parallax (meaning that it lay at a very great distance) and was thus not of the
sublunary sphere and therefore contrary to the Aristotelian assertion of the
immutability of the heavens; similarly, a succession of comets appeared to be
moving freely through a region that was supposed to be filled with solid, crystalline
spheres. Tycho devised his own world system—a modification of Heracleides’—to
avoid various undesirable implications of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the German astronomer Johannes

Kepler placed the Copernican hypothesis on firm astronomical footing. Converted to
the new astronomy as a student and deeply motivated by a neo-Pythagorean desire
for finding the mathematical principles of order and harmony according to which God
had constructed the world, Kepler spent his life looking for simple mathematical
relationships that described planetary motions. His painstaking search for the real
order of the universe forced him finally to abandon the Platonic ideal of uniform
circular motion in his search for a physical basis for the motions of the heavens.

In 1609 Kepler announced two new planetary laws derived from Tycho’s data:
(1) the planets travel around the Sun in elliptical orbits, one focus of the ellipse being
occupied by the Sun; and (2) a planet moves in its orbit in such a manner that a line
drawn from the planet to the Sun always sweeps out equal areas in equal times.
With these two laws, Kepler abandoned uniform circular motion of the planets on
their spheres, thus raising the fundamental physical question of what holds the
planets in their orbits. He attempted to provide a physical basis for the planetary
motions by means of a force analogous to the magnetic force, the qualitative
properties of which had been recently described in England by William Gilbert in his
influential treatise, De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus et de Magno Magnete
Tellure (1600; “On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the
Earth”). The impending marriage of astronomy and physics had been announced. In
1618 Kepler stated his third law, which was one of many laws concerned with the

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SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

harmonies of the planetary motions: (3) the square of the period in which a planet
orbits the Sun is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the Sun.

A powerful blow was dealt to traditional cosmology by Galileo Galilei, who

early in the 17th century used the telescope, a recent invention of Dutch lens
grinders, to look toward the heavens.

In 1610 Galileo announced observations that contradicted many traditional

cosmological assumptions. He observed that the Moon is not a smooth, polished
surface, as Aristotle had claimed, but that it is jagged and mountainous. Earthshine
on the Moon revealed that Earth, like the other planets, shines by reflected light. Like
Earth, Jupiter was observed to have satellites; hence, Earth had been demoted from
its unique position. The phases of Venus proved that that planet orbits the Sun, not
Earth.

Mechanics
The battle for Copernicanism was fought in the realm of mechanics as well
as astronomy. The Ptolemaic–Aristotelian system stood or fell as a monolith, and it
rested on the idea of Earth’s fixity at the centre of the cosmos. Removing Earth from
the centre destroyed the doctrine of natural motion and place, and circular motion of
Earth was incompatible with Aristotelian physics.

Galileo’s contributions to the science of mechanics were related directly to his

defense of Copernicanism. Although in his youth he adhered to the traditional
impetus physics, his desire to mathematize in the manner of Archimedes led him to
abandon the traditional approach and develop the foundations for a new physics that
was both highly mathematizable and directly related to the problems facing the new
cosmology. Interested in finding the natural acceleration of falling bodies, he was
able to derive the law of free fall (the distance, s, varies as the square of the time, t2.
Combining this result with his rudimentary form of the principle of inertia, he was able
to derive the parabolic path of projectile motion. Furthermore, his principle of inertia
enabled him to meet the traditional physical objections to Earth’s motion: since a
body in motion tends to remain in motion, projectiles and other objects on the
terrestrial surface will tend to share the motions of Earth, which will thus be
imperceptible to someone standing on Earth.

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PARADIGM SHIFT AND
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

The 17th-century contributions to mechanics of the French philosopher René

Descartes, like his contributions to the scientific endeavour as a whole, were more
concerned with problems in the foundations of science than with the solution of
specific technical problems. He was principally concerned with the conceptions of
matter and motion as part of his general program for science—namely, to explain all
the phenomena of nature in terms of matter and motion. This program, known as the
mechanical philosophy, came to be the dominant theme of 17th-century science.

Descartes rejected the idea that one piece of matter could act on another
through empty space; instead, forces must be propagated by a material substance,
the “ether,” that fills all space. Although matter tends to move in a straight line in
accordance with the principle of inertia, it cannot occupy space already filled by other
matter, so the only kind of motion that can actually occur is a vortex in which each
particle in a ring moves simultaneously.

According to Descartes, all natural phenomena depend on the collisions of

small particles, and so it is of great importance to discover the quantitative laws of
impact. This was done by Descartes’s disciple, the Dutch physicist Christiaan
Huygens, who formulated the laws of conservation of momentum and of kinetic
energy (the latter being valid only for elastic collisions).

The work of Sir Isaac Newton represents the culmination of the Scientific
Revolution at the end of the 17th century. His monumental Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) solved
the major problems posed by the Scientific Revolution in mechanics and
in cosmology. It provided a physical basis for Kepler’s laws, unified celestial and
terrestrial physics under one set of laws, and established the problems and methods
that dominated much of astronomy and physics for well over a century. By means of
the concept of force, Newton was able to synthesize two important components of
the Scientific Revolution, the mechanical philosophy and the mathematization of
nature.

Newton was able to derive all these striking results from his three laws of motion:
1. Every body continues in its state of rest or of motion in a straight line unless it is
compelled to change that state by force impressed on it;

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SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

2. The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and is made in
the direction of the straight line in which that force is impressed;

3. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions
of two bodies upon each other are always equal.

The second law was put into its modern form F = ma (where a is acceleration)
by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1750. In this form, it is clear that the
rate of change of velocity is directly proportional to the force acting on a body and
inversely proportional to its mass.

In order to apply his laws to astronomy, Newton had to extend the mechanical
philosophy beyond the limits set by Descartes. He postulated a gravitational
force acting between any two objects in the universe, even though he was unable to
explain how this force could be propagated.

By means of his laws of motion and a gravitational force proportional to the

inverse square of the distance between the centres of two bodies, Newton could
deduce Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Galileo’s law of free fall is also consistent
with Newton’s laws. The same force that causes objects to fall near the surface of
Earth also holds the Moon and planets in their orbits.

Newton’s physics led to the conclusion that the shape of Earth is not precisely
spherical but should bulge at the Equator. The confirmation of this prediction by
French expeditions in the mid-18th century helped persuade most European
scientists to change from Cartesian to Newtonian physics.

Newton also used the nonspherical shape of Earth to explain the precession
of the equinoxes, using the differential action of the Moon and Sun on the equatorial
bulge to show how the axis of rotation would change its direction.

Optics
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SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

The science of optics in the 17th century expressed the fundamental outlook
of the Scientific Revolution by combining an experimental approach with
a quantitative analysis of phenomena. Optics had its origins in Greece, especially in
the works of Euclid (c. 300 BCE), who stated many of the results in geometric optics
that the Greeks had discovered, including the law of reflection: the angle of incidence
is equal to the angle of reflection. In the 13th century, such men as Roger
Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, and John Pecham, relying on the work of the Arab Ibn
al-Haytham (died c. 1040), considered numerous optical problems, including the
optics of the rainbow. It was Kepler, taking his lead from the writings of these 13th-
century opticians, who set the tone for the science in the 17th century. Kepler
introduced the point by point analysis of optical problems, tracing rays from each
point on the object to a point on the image. Just as the mechanical philosophy was
breaking the world into atomic parts, so Kepler approached optics by breaking
organic reality into what he considered to be ultimately real units. He developed a
geometric theory of lenses, providing the first mathematical account
of Galileo’s telescope.

Descartes sought to incorporate the phenomena of light into mechanical

philosophy by demonstrating that they can be explained entirely in terms of matter
and motion. Using mechanical analogies, he was able to derive mathematically
many of the known properties of light, including the law of reflection and the newly
discovered law of refraction.

Many of the most important contributions to optics in the 17th century were
the work of Newton, especially the theory of colours. Traditional theory considered
colours to be the result of the modification of white light. Descartes, for example,
thought that colours were the result of the spin of the particles that constitute light.
Newton upset the traditional theory of colours by demonstrating in an impressive set
of experiments that white light is a mixture out of which separate beams of coloured
light can be separated. He associated different degrees of refrangibility with rays of
different colours, and in this manner he was able to explain the way prisms produce
spectra of colours from white light.

His experimental method was characterized by a quantitative approach, since

he always sought measurable variables and a clear distinction between experimental
findings and mechanical explanations of those findings. His second important
contribution to optics dealt with the interference phenomena that came to be called
“Newton’s rings.” Although the colours of thin films (e.g., oil on water) had been
previously observed, no one had attempted to quantify the phenomena in any way.
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Newton observed quantitative relations between the thickness of the film and the
diameters of the rings of colour, a regularity he attempted to explain by his theory of
fits of easy transmission and fits of easy reflection. Notwithstanding the fact that he
generally conceived of light as being particulate, Newton’s theory of fits involves
periodicity and vibrations of ether, the hypothetical fluid substance permeating all
space.

Huygens was the second great optical thinker of the 17th century. Although
he was critical of many of the details of Descartes’s system, he wrote in
the Cartesian tradition, seeking purely mechanical explanations of phenomena.
Huygens regarded light as something of a pulse phenomenon, but he explicitly
denied the periodicity of light pulses. He developed the concept of wave front, by
means of which he was able to derive the laws of reflection and refraction from his
pulse theory and to explain the recently discovered phenomenon of double
refraction.

Chemistry
Chemistry had manifold origins, coming from
such diverse sources as philosophy, alchemy, metallurgy, and medicine. It
emerged as a separate science only with the rise of mechanical philosophy in
the 17th century. Aristotle had regarded the four elements earth, water, air, and
fire as the ultimate constituents of all things. Transmutable each into the other,
all four elements were believed to exist in every substance. Originating in
Egypt and the Middle East, alchemy had a double aspect: on the one hand it
was a practical endeavour aimed to make gold from baser substances, while
on the other it was a cosmological theory based on the correspondence
between man and the universe at large. Alchemy contributed to chemistry a
long tradition of experience with a wide variety of substances. Paracelsus, a
16th-century Swiss natural philosopher, was a seminal figure in the history of
chemistry, putting together in an almost impenetrable combination the
Aristotelian theory of matter, alchemical correspondences, mystical forms of
knowledge, and chemical therapy in medicine. His influence was widely felt in
succeeding generations.

During the first half of the 17th century, there were few established doctrines
that chemists generally accepted as a framework. As a result, there was
little cumulative growth of chemical knowledge. Chemists tended to build detailed
systems, “chemical philosophies,” attempting to explain the entire universe in
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chemical terms. Most chemists accepted the traditional four elements (air, earth,
water, fire), or the Paracelsian principles (salt, sulfur, mercury), or both, as the
bearers of real qualities in substances; they also exhibited a marked tendency
toward the occult.

The interaction between chemistry and mechanical philosophy altered this

situation by providing chemists with a shared language. The mechanical philosophy
had been successfully employed in other areas; it seemed consistent with an
experimental empiricism and seemed to provide a way to render chemistry
respectable by translating it into the terms of the new science. Perhaps the best
example of the influence of the mechanical philosophy is the work of Robert Boyle.
The thrust of his work was to understand the chemical properties of matter, to
provide experimental evidence for the mechanical philosophy, and to demonstrate
that all chemical properties can be explained in mechanical terms. He was an
excellent laboratory chemist and developed a number of important techniques,
especially colour-identification tests.

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