The Scientific Revolution
Explore the Scientific Revolution — the 16th–17th century transformation that replaced ancient authority with observation and mathematics as the path to truth.
The Scientific Revolution (c. 1543–1687) was the intellectual transformation that established the methods, institutions, and worldview of modern science. In a span of roughly 150 years, European thinkers overturned nearly two millennia of accepted wisdom about the natural world, replacing the authority of Aristotle and the Church with observation, experiment, and mathematical reasoning.
The revolution is conventionally dated from Copernicus's publication of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), which proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun — directly contradicting Church teaching and Aristotelian cosmology. Galileo's telescopic observations provided visual evidence for the Copernican model and, equally importantly, demonstrated the power of instruments to reveal truths invisible to the naked eye. Kepler's discovery that planets move in ellipses, not perfect circles, shattered the ancient conviction that celestial motion must be geometrically perfect.
The revolution culminated in Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687), which unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics under a single set of mathematical laws. Newton showed that the same force that makes an apple fall governs the motions of planets — a revelation of breathtaking simplicity and power. The Scientific Revolution did not merely change what people believed about the natural world; it changed how they believed. The conviction that the universe operates according to discoverable natural laws, accessible through observation and mathematics, became the foundation of the modern worldview.