What was the Scientific Revolution?
The Scientific Revolution (c. 1543–1687) was the period when European thinkers developed the modern scientific method based on observation, experimentation, and mathematical reasoning. Figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton overturned ancient authorities on astronomy, physics, and biology, establishing science as the dominant way of understanding the natural world.
The Scientific Revolution was the intellectual transformation that created modern science as we know it. Conventionally dated from Copernicus's publication of De Revolutionibus in 1543 to Newton's Principia in 1687, it represented a fundamental shift in how Europeans understood and investigated the natural world — from reliance on ancient authorities (particularly Aristotle and Ptolemy) to systematic observation, experimentation, and mathematical analysis.
The revolution began with astronomy. Copernicus proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun, directly contradicting the Ptolemaic geocentric model that had dominated for 1,400 years. Tycho Brahe compiled the most accurate astronomical observations to date. Johannes Kepler used Brahe's data to discover that planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular. And Galileo Galilei, using the newly invented telescope, observed mountains on the Moon, the phases of Venus, and Jupiter's moons — evidence that devastated the old cosmology.
Beyond astronomy, the revolution transformed every branch of natural philosophy. William Harvey demonstrated the circulation of blood, overturning 1,500 years of Galenic medicine. Robert Boyle established modern chemistry by insisting on experimental verification. Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms. Francis Bacon articulated the inductive method, while René Descartes developed deductive rationalism. The Royal Society of London and the French Académie des Sciences institutionalized scientific inquiry.
The culmination came with Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687), which unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics under universal laws of motion and gravitation. Newton showed that the same mathematical laws governed both falling apples and orbiting planets. This was revolutionary not just scientifically but philosophically — it suggested that the universe operated according to rational, discoverable laws, an idea that profoundly influenced the Enlightenment.