The Scientific Revolution Before 1500 people looked to

The Scientific Revolution

Before 1500 people looked to what the ancient Greeks and Romans wrote for the truth

They would also take the beliefs of the Church above all else

During the Middle Ages most scholars believed that the Earth never moved and that it was the center of the universe

This idea is known as the Geocentric Theory

By the 1500 s scholars had begun to challenge the Ancients and the Church

This led to a world changing event known as the Scientific Revolution

The Church was threatened by these new ideas because they had linked all known scientific knowledge to the Christian faith

The first major challenge to the “Old Beliefs” was The Heliocentric Theory

Heliocentric belief held that the earth was at the center of the universe. Problem: The movement of the planets could not be explained logically when the Earth was placed in the center

These problems troubled a Polish holy man and astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus

He feared punishment by the Church so he did not publish his findings until the year that he died

Shortly thereafter it was proven that it was the heart that pumped blood throughout the body

The dissection of human bodies had long been forbidden by the Church, but now curious minds begun the study of Anatomy

An Englishman named Sir Francis Bacon pioneered a new focus on Experimentation

Sir Francis Bacon • Bacon attacked medieval scholars for relying too heavily on the conclusions of Aristotle and other ancient thinkers. • He urged scientists to experiment and then draw conclusions. • This approach is called empiricism, or the experimental method. This led to the creation of the Scientific Method.

The Scientific Method • The scientific method is a procedure for gathering and testing ideas. • It begins with a question. • Scientists next form a hypothesis, or unproved assumption. • The hypothesis is then tested in an experiment or on the basis of data. • Scientists analyze and interpret their data. The conclusion either confirms or disproves the hypothesis.

Galileo Galilei • He was the first person to use telescopes to look at the heavenly bodies. • With the telescope he discovered: Craters and mountains on the moon Moons of Jupiter Phases of Venus The Milky Way consists of innumerable stars. Sunspots move across the sun’s face. All of these favored the Copernican (heliocentric) model

These findings backed up Copernicus

High ranking members of the Church began to get worried because Galileo was challenging so many of their teachings

They were particularly bothered by Sun Spots, because they showed that the solar system was not perfect

During the height of the Inquisition Galileo visited the Vatican and tried to convince the Church not to attack his ideas

He claimed that everything in the Bible should not be taken literally and that nothing that he said contradicted it anyway

The Pope decided to have Galileo arrested and under the threat of torture, he confessed that his ideas of Copernicus were false. The earth was NOT the center of the solar system.

For the rest of his life Galileo lived under house arrest, but his ideas spread

In 1687 Isaac Newton published “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”

In the book Newton proved that all objects in the Universe had a set of physical laws

These became the law of Universal Gravitation

Newton wrote that the Universe was like a giant clock where all of the parts worked and reacted with each other

In one book Newton had single handedly brought all of the ideas of the Scientific World together

Newton’s later accomplishments are nearly endless:

He was able to explain how and why Prisms occur

In doing this he invented the reflecting telescope

His work is the basis of modern Engineering

Newton innovated the Mathematic technique known as Calculus

Newton is also considered to be the father of Physics

His work proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Heliocentric Theory was correct

He spent a large part of his life searching for a secret code within the Bible

In doing this he predicted that the world would end no sooner than 2060 AD

There were many odd things about Newton’s Personality:

He would sometimes sit up in bed for hours, without moving, just thinking about a specific scientific question

He once blinded himself for several days by staring at the Sun for too long

Newton was deeply involved in Alchemy – trying to turn lead into gold

Isaac Newton is considered to be one of the greatest Scientific Geniuses in History

Throughout the late 1600 s and early 1700 s the Scientific Revolution continued to change the world

In 1670 a Dutch curtain maker named Anton van Leeuwenhoek used a microscope to first observe bacteria

Torricelli, a student of Galileo, created the first barometer to predict weather

Gabriel Fahrenheit made the first thermometer during the Scientific Revolution

The first vaccines were developed

Robert Boyle • Pioneered the use of the scientific method in chemistry. • Challenged Aristotle’s idea that the physical world consisted of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. • Boyle proposed that matter was made up of smaller primary particles that joined together in different ways.

Other major advances occurred in the field of Chemistry

How the Scientific Revolution Spread – The notions of reason and order, which created so many breakthroughs in science, soon moved into other fields of life. – Philosophers and scholars across Europe began to rethink long-held beliefs about the human condition, most notably the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens. – These thinkers helped to usher in a movement that challenged the age-old relationship between a government and its people – Eventually changed forever the political landscape in numerous societies with The Enlightenment.

The Scientific Revolution truly changed the world forever!