The Scientific Revolution

For fourteen centuries, the educated European understood the cosmos through Ptolemy. The Earth sat motionless at the center. Around it, nested crystalline spheres carried the Moon, the Sun, the planets, and the fixed stars in perfect circular orbits. Where the orbits didn't quite match observation, Ptolemy added epicycles — smaller circles riding on larger ones — until the math worked out. The system was ugly but functional. It predicted eclipses. It told you when to plant crops. It agreed with Aristotle, and Aristotle agreed with the Church, and the Church agreed with common sense: you could feel that the Earth was still.

The crystalline spheres were not metaphors. Scholars debated their material composition. Were they solid? Fluid? What happened when a comet passed through them? The question sounds absurd now. It was not absurd then. These people were working with the best available model of reality, and within that model, the spheres were as real as gravity is to us.

What shattered those spheres was not a single discovery but a cascade of them, spread across two centuries, carried out by men who often did not understand the full implications of their own work. The result was a new way of knowing the world — one that privileged observation over authority, mathematics over tradition, and experiment over inherited wisdom.