Scientific Revolution

Of those civilizations where natural phenomena were subjected to scrutiny of a kind that went beyond their identification with the divine, only two did so against the background of an articulated worldview. In the Chinese tradition, which was uninterrupted until the Jesuits brought modern science along, practitioners were much inclined to an empiricist approach.

In contrast, two distinct Greek traditions—one mathematical, one philosophical—were quick to rationalize the empirically given. The Greeks also experienced a range of potentially fertile transplantations from other civilizations. In one tradition, called "Alexandrian" for short, Archimedes (c. 450–c. 388 B.C.E.), Ptolemy (2d c. C.E.), and others subjected a limited number of empirical phenomena (planetary positions, vibrating strings, and a few others) to mathematical treatment in highly abstract ways that left connections with reality minimal (i.e., the resulting science of music dealt with numbers, not with vibrations). In the other tradition, called "Athenian" for short, natural philosophers posited a limited number of first principles to explain the world at large (e.g., substantial forms in Aristotelianism, or indivisible particles and the void in atomism) and empirically shored up these principles by appeal to selected chunks of observable reality.

By means of three successive large-scale efforts at translation (second-/eighth-century Baghdad, twelfth-century Toledo, fifteenth-century Italy) these two modes of nature knowledge were transplanted, first to Islamic civilization wholesale, then (in a truncated manner) to medieval Europe, then (upon the fall of Byzantium) wholesale once again to Renaissance Europe. In each case the Greek legacy was received, then enriched in often creative ways that left the broad framework unscathed. As a result, the state that knowledge of nature attained in Europe by 1600 was broadly similar to what it had once been like in Islamic civilization before (in the fifth to eleventh centuries) waves of invasions nipped a possible next stage of radical transformation in the bud. For the second time, in Renaissance Europe, careful reconstruction of the legacy of the Alexandrian geometers gave rise to incidental enrichment, the way Copernicus improved on Ptolemy in trusted Alexandrian fashion. Also, the incessant, inherently irresolvable debate between the four schools of Athenian natural philosophy and their skeptical nemesis raged once again.

Beside these essentially backward-looking modes of nature knowledge, Renaissance Europe also developed a third mode, which, unlike the other two, reflected in its forward-looking dynamism certain peculiarities of the civilization at large. This third mode of nature knowledge, bent upon accurate, magic-tinged description, developed an empiricism different from the Chinese variety in that it was marked by a drive toward domination or at least coercion of the natural environment.

Onset of the revolution.

With this much as background, we can now conceptualize the onset of the Scientific Revolution very briefly as the near-simultaneous, revolutionary transformation of three traditions.

First, natural philosophers turned the Alexandrian tradition into the Alexandrian-plus tradition. In astronomy, Kepler and Galileo, in seeking to resolve major tensions in Copernicus's variety of heliocentrism, toned down the highly abstract approach of the Greek geometers with an infusion of physical reality. For terrestrial phenomena, other natural philosophers did this by means of experiments carefully designed to demonstrate the mathematically ideal phenomenon, and these served as an empirical check on theoretical outcomes. Central to such mathematization of nature was a new conception of motion as tending to persist and as relative, in ways tentatively worked out by Galileo and his disciples for a range of cases (like falling bodies and outflowing water).

Second, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) turned the Athenian tradition into the Athenian-plus tradition. Inside the atomist doctrine, which they adopted in its essentials, they shifted emphasis from the shapes and sizes of subvisible particles to their movements, and these movements, they held, were governed by general laws that conceived of motion as persisting and relative. Descartes gave systematic expression to this conception of a world fully explicable through the imagined motions of imagined particles. He found warrant for its truth in allegedly rigorous, pseudo-mathematical derivation from first principles and empirical backing in a wealth of examples taken, without experimental intervention, from real-life phenomena.

Third, in the uniquely European, coercive, and empirical third mode of knowledge of nature, setting up carefully designed fact-finding experiments was central. This contrasts with the Athenian-plus tradition, where experimentation was lacking, and the Alexandrian-plus tradition, where experimentation served as a means of a posteriori empirical support. This transformation occurred at the hands of, notably, Francis Bacon (1561–1626; who preached rather than practiced the approach), William Gilbert (1544–1603; magnetic and electric phenomena), Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644; the chemical composition of matter/spirit), and William Harvey (the circulation of blood).

Ongoing innovation and remaining continuities.

In the hands of those who went along, the approaches of the traditions changed science drastically in each case. Natural philosophers mathematized an ever increasing range of phenomena, whether encountered in nature (like sound) or in contemporary craftsmanship (like gunnery), devised universal explanations through an endless variety of particle movements, and to a vast extent experimentally explored the unknown, whether encountered in nature (like wind) or in contemporary craftsmanship (like textile dyeing). What also changed was that the two first modes of explanation, which jointly defied common sense and conjured up the specter of a clockwork universe devoid of divine concern or human purpose, quickly became entangled in a battle of legitimacy of quite uncertain outcome. Meanwhile, what remained the same, at least up to the mid-seventeenth century, were the respective knowledge structures: in one case thinkers used first principles to attain at one stroke a definitive, comprehensive grasp of the world; in the other two cases, practitioners looked at phenomena to make piecemeal, step-by-step advances. Also, practitioners of each mode as a rule operated in insulation from one another. Even if an individual like Descartes or the English mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) did work in more than one mode, he made no effort to let results attained in one mode bear upon the other, let alone to reconcile (occasionally) incompatible outcomes (e.g., Descartes's Alexandrian derivation of his sine law of refraction required the assumption that light has finite velocity, whereas in his Athenian-plus philosophy its velocity is necessarily infinite).

A decisive, mid-century change of scenery.

Starting in the early 1660s, after the stabilization of princely authority in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia and (in Britain) the Restoration, a mood of reconciliation descended upon Europe. That mood helped overcome the rapidly expanding crisis of legitimacy. Efforts in the 1630s to 1650s to enforce a return to the fold (the trial of Galileo, the tribulations of van Helmont and Descartes) and countless cases of ensuing self-censorship gave way to conditional, religiously sanctioned acceptance. A prerequisite for this transition was the well-known shift of Europe's political, commercial, cultural, and scientific center from the Mediterranean (Italy, Spain, Austria, and Southern Germany) to the Atlantic (France and Britain). The new science was carefully walled off from all that might smack of heresy, and its experimental, and hence philosophy-free, aspects were institutionally emphasized. As a result, its widely perceived material and ideological promise of improvement of daily life and of a decisive edge in warfare earned the new science official sustenance in two major associations that came to dominate ongoing innovation of knowledge of nature in the second half of the seventeenth century and beyond. These were the Royal Society in London and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, both founded in the 1660s. As a result of breakthroughs in, for example, microscopy (Antony van van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of bacteria and spermatozoa) and telescopic measurement (large-scale revision of the size of the universe), the societies of London and Paris and the journals to emanate from both came to serve as rallying centers for intellectuals in Europe to contribute in a major way to ongoing innovation.

Even more revolutionary was a new mood of reconciliation in the sciences. The Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) and the young Newton—in blending their prime allegiance to the Galilean approach with their acceptance of the doctrine of particles in ubiquitous motion not as comprehensive dogma but as a selectively applicable hypothesis—sought to resolve the tension between the Galilean and Cartesian conceptions of motion for a range of principal cases (impact, persisting motion, rotation, oscillation). At about the same time the British physicist and chemist Robert Boyle, the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635–1703), and again the young Newton, in blending their fact-finding experimentalism with the hypothesis of particles in ubiquitous motion, managed to anchor subtly particulate mechanisms in empirical evidence and by the same move to provide their fact finding with some badly needed coherence and direction. In the end, the mature Newton not only became aware of the limitations inherent in the two highly innovative approaches but even transcended these modes in ways codified in a book that rounded off the Scientific Revolution, his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical principles of natural philosophy), published in 1687.

The outcome.

The major result of all this was that science became a distinct enterprise, placed more prominently in society than at any other time and place. Its prominence was due not only to the promise of practical results widely attributed to it but also to intellectuals' desire to make mathematical-experimental or fact-finding-experimental assertions about natural phenomena clinching rather than at best plausible (as in speculative natural philosophy). Indeed, up against the perennial human inclination to let our bias decide, it is in the capacity of the new science to produce conclusive outcomes that its uniqueness as a mode of knowledge resides. Herein lies the deepest reason for calling the highly conditioned emergence of science and its ensuing staying power a revolution if ever there was one.