This course is about the changes in scientific thinking over the most exciting period of upheaval and discovery in the history of science before the 20th century. In the history of science, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the 17th century has an almost mythic status, not unlike the French Revolution or the American Revolution. In the consciousness of modern science, it is where modern science (or for some, science itself) began, and it is when the great heroes of the founding of modern science – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, etc. – banished millennia of superstition, philosophical speculation and hocus-pocus, and modern theories and modern methods of science all were born, bringing light to where there had been darkness and mere speculation.
It’s a nice image, and it makes for a rattling good tale for a couple of pages at the beginning of science textbooks, but the simplistic folk-history is pretty much completely wrong: the story is far, far more interesting than that, as much about continuities with previous science or the slow evolution of ideas as it is about a ‘revolution’. What came before wasn’t all that bad (or non-scientific), and what came after wasn’t all so modern, either. What is even more striking is that the origins of many new ‘modern’ ideas and discoveries are about as un-modern as can be.
When you get close to these events, it sometimes gets hard to find the ‘revolution’. That something dramatic happened between the time of Copernicus’ youth (the late 15th century, say 1490) and the wide dissemination and adoption of Newton’s physical theories (the first half of the 18th century, say 1740) is very clear: the period was called ‘the scientific revolution’ by contemporary scientists, and even by the late 17th century the magnitude of the changes were clear for all to see. So something was going on, although quite what is not so clear.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the scientific work of this period. In many ways we still live in the shadow of this revolution, since the science that emerged from the Scientific Revolution forms the ultimate basis of all subsequent science and scientific methods. Even though the science of the 17th century has been superseded, the way of thinking and the methodology of science that emerged from this revolution remain the paradigm of scientific thinking. Over the ‘Revolution’ not only were individual theories changed completely (the causal explanations of the behaviour of the planets, or the causes of projectile or free-fall motion or chemical phenomena, or the theory of matter, for example) but the very methods that science used to investigate nature and the deepest basis of the explanations of material phenomena changed completely.
When we get closer to the ideas, the major figures, the scientific thinking and methods of the time, and the intellectual and social culture within which science worked over these two centuries, the so-called revolution becomes much less clear. Upon a closer examination, the drama of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures recedes into unsuspected origins and continuities in scientific thinking. All sorts of ‘modern’ ideas emerge in a context and within arguments and thinking that were anything but what we would call modern. Indeed, when looked at in their proper historical context, the un-modernity of the ideas and theories we take to be the origins of modern science is astonishing: the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Harvey, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and the rest of the traditional pantheon of Heroes of The Revolution turn out to be deeply different when not viewed anachronistically from a modern perspective. Which means that they are a great deal more interesting to understand: they weren’t trying to do what we call ‘modern science’, but something else.
Of equal significance to the new theories about the workings of the physical world, the changes in science and scientific practice over this period also gave rise to a new social status for science and its practitioners, and the new science claimed a radically different role in society, both in its institutions and in its social prestige and power. Science had begun its emergence as a central pillar of European culture.
By examining the scientific, social, and intellectual context of the origins of the scientific revolution, we will be able to understand both how radical it was, and how much continuity and tradition was maintained as well; by looking at a number of disciplines like astronomy and cosmology, physics, physiology and medicine, and matter theory, along with natural philosophy and debates about methodology, the breadth and depth of the innovations and discoveries will be seen. But above all, these lectures will aim to show how difficult and strange these innovations were for contemporaries, how complex and exciting the processes were that gave rise to them, and how different from modern scientific thinking were many of these supposedly ‘modern’ scientists.
Although a great deal is going to be packed into this course, no technical or scientific background will be required, but a good sense of humour is essential.
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