Lesson 1 - The Scientific Revolution
From scholasticism, through humanism to science.
From scholasticism, through humanism to science.
This is a long and demanding lesson. It has no direct relevance to the American or French Revolutions and does not need to be revised for Matu exams. But it is still one of the most important lessons you will study. The American and French Revolutions were political conclusions of new ways of thinking that had been developing for centuries. Before we can understand the events of the late 18th century, we must travel back to the end of the Middle Ages to see how the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment changed how Europeans understood the world.
You will meet difficult ideas and important thinkers. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything on the first reading—try, reread, and keep going.
You will meet difficult ideas and important thinkers. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything on the first reading—try, reread, and keep going.
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Scholasticism - Aquinas incorporates Aristotle
Medieval thought was restricted to thinking about issues raised by the study of Christian doctrine, especially after new Arabic translations of classical Greek texts began to appear and challenge Christianity after the Fall of Toledo in 1085. Medieval intellectuals could be concerned with complex problems and would employ highly rational thinking. This intellectual world restrained by the limits of Catholicism we call 'Scholasticism.' Thomas Aquinas |
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The greatest philosopher of the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas, explained what happened during the Eucharist, one of the seven Sacraments of the Catholic church. The problem to be solved was very practical. Why, during the Eucharist does the bread and wine not appear to change into the body and blood of Christ, after it is blessed?
To explain this Aquinas used the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle argued there are two qualities to every object: its outer appearance that our senses can detect, (smell, taste, hear etc.) and its inner nature or fundamental structure that we cannot simply detect. The outer appearance changes all the time. For example, a chair can be made of wood or metal, but this is not essential to its being a chair. It is still a chair regardless of the material from which it is made, these variations were called accidents.
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The fundamental property of all chairs, its inner essence - its ‘chairiness’ - Aristotle called its substance. The substance of an object cannot be detected by the senses, because to imagine a chair is to see a particular chair.
So how did Aquinas use this? What happens during the Eucharist is that the accidental properties of the bread and wine do not change, but the substance - its ‘breadiness’ - does change in to the body of Jesus: the substance is changed, it is ‘transubstantiated’. Voila. This process is what the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. Logical, rational and very learned. Medieval minds were not less logical or intelligent than ours! |
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Humanism
Humanism is a way of thinking that emerged in the Renaissance which placed human beings, human potential and human experience at the centre of learning, rather than religious doctrine.
Rather than learning methods and logic to explain and defend Christianity, Humanism, was concerned with knowledge itself and in particular, knowledge about humanity. That meant that humanists were interested in subjects like poetry, language (especially ancient Greek) and history. This is what we mean when we say we study the 'humanities' today. One of the most significant consequences of the Fall of Constantinople to Islam in 1453 had been the arrival not only of the books from the greatest libraries in Europe, but also teachers who were familiar with the Ancient Greek necessary to translate them. At almost the same time, because of the printing press it became possible to read and spread a new knowledge that was not controlled by the church; new knowledge became abundantly available. These books became a source of inspiration for those who didn't want to follow the rules of the church and became to foundation of what in history is called the Renaissance. The medieval church was concerned to explain and justify human suffering, the humanists were concerned to reduce human suffering and focus instead on human happiness.
Key features
Humanism is a way of thinking that emerged in the Renaissance which placed human beings, human potential and human experience at the centre of learning, rather than religious doctrine.
Rather than learning methods and logic to explain and defend Christianity, Humanism, was concerned with knowledge itself and in particular, knowledge about humanity. That meant that humanists were interested in subjects like poetry, language (especially ancient Greek) and history. This is what we mean when we say we study the 'humanities' today. One of the most significant consequences of the Fall of Constantinople to Islam in 1453 had been the arrival not only of the books from the greatest libraries in Europe, but also teachers who were familiar with the Ancient Greek necessary to translate them. At almost the same time, because of the printing press it became possible to read and spread a new knowledge that was not controlled by the church; new knowledge became abundantly available. These books became a source of inspiration for those who didn't want to follow the rules of the church and became to foundation of what in history is called the Renaissance. The medieval church was concerned to explain and justify human suffering, the humanists were concerned to reduce human suffering and focus instead on human happiness.
Key features
- Return to classical sources – especially Greek and Roman texts.
- Focus on human experience rather than solely on God or Church doctrine.
- Emphasis on education, critical thinking and eloquence.
- Belief in human potential to shape and improve the world.
- A shift from medieval ‘scholastic’ logic to a more open, curious, and text-based study of humanity.
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Humanism was the original rallying call to 'think outside of the box'. If the box was Catholic orthodoxy and Scholasticism was a thinking that fitted inside the box, humanism looked down at the box and laughed at how everything looked so square. A lot of what is remembered about humanism concerns how humanists made fun of the church. Humanists were often university academics who laughed at the ignorance of the priests and the strange superstitions of church ritual. The most famous of them, Erasmus, made fun of how the priests 'brayed like donkeys in church, repeating the words of psalms they don't understand'.
A more recent example that makes fun of medieval scholasticism is provided by Monty Python. |
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'Paradigm shift' in science
For centuries, scientists and philosophers had accepted the work of Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, which they interpreted in the light of Christian belief. (Scholasticism) But now Renaissance astronomers used the new scientific methods of experimenting and observation to study the skies. It was their sensational discoveries which shook European beliefs about the world. American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) described this process as a 'paradigm shift'. By 'paradigm' he means the scientific assumptions (and methods) that underlie what (and how) we know the world. The scholastic paradigm assumed that the ultimate truth was found in uncovering God's perspective as outlined in the Bible. This was replaced by a humanist perspective that suggested that the truth was to be uncovered by human observation of the natural world.
The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c.570-495 BC) proved that the Earth was round and Aristarchus suggested that the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun. However, these ideas were replaced by Ptolemy's theories of the universe written in about AD100. Ptolemy was an Egyptian mathematician, astronomer and geographer who believed that the planets and stars all revolved around the Earth. This 'geocentric' theory fitted well with the Church's ideas of the heavens being a circle, because it was the 'perfect' shape. It also fitted with the idea of the Earth (God's creation), the Church and God himself being at the centre of the universe
For centuries, scientists and philosophers had accepted the work of Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, which they interpreted in the light of Christian belief. (Scholasticism) But now Renaissance astronomers used the new scientific methods of experimenting and observation to study the skies. It was their sensational discoveries which shook European beliefs about the world. American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) described this process as a 'paradigm shift'. By 'paradigm' he means the scientific assumptions (and methods) that underlie what (and how) we know the world. The scholastic paradigm assumed that the ultimate truth was found in uncovering God's perspective as outlined in the Bible. This was replaced by a humanist perspective that suggested that the truth was to be uncovered by human observation of the natural world.
The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c.570-495 BC) proved that the Earth was round and Aristarchus suggested that the Earth and planets revolved around the Sun. However, these ideas were replaced by Ptolemy's theories of the universe written in about AD100. Ptolemy was an Egyptian mathematician, astronomer and geographer who believed that the planets and stars all revolved around the Earth. This 'geocentric' theory fitted well with the Church's ideas of the heavens being a circle, because it was the 'perfect' shape. It also fitted with the idea of the Earth (God's creation), the Church and God himself being at the centre of the universe
What was the Scientific Revolution?
The Scientific Revolution is a concept used by historians to describe the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in science transformed views about nature. While its dates are debated, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is often cited as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution. It is a paradigm shift, because the key assumption of a stationary earth surrounded by moving heavenly bodies is replaced by a new heliocentric view of the cosmos. The completion of the scientific revolution is attributed to the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia, that formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, and completed the synthesis of a new cosmology.
The Scientific Revolution is a concept used by historians to describe the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in science transformed views about nature. While its dates are debated, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres is often cited as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution. It is a paradigm shift, because the key assumption of a stationary earth surrounded by moving heavenly bodies is replaced by a new heliocentric view of the cosmos. The completion of the scientific revolution is attributed to the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia, that formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, and completed the synthesis of a new cosmology.
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Deductive and Inductive Logic
We have previously examined how medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas applied Aristotle’s logic to problems of theological importance to the medieval mind. The question, 'should Christians attempt to covert dog heads?', followed impeccable deductive logic. We should attempt to convert to Christianity all creatures with souls Dogheads have souls Therefore we should try to convert dogheads. |
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This example of deductive reasoning is called a syllogism. A syllogism is a deductive argument which arrives at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true. A typical example said to derive from Aristotle says:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
As long as the propositions are true, the conclusion must be true. Because dogheads have souls we should try and convert them. An argument can still be valid even when the conclusion is false, if one of the propositions is false.
All men have beards
Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates has a beard
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
As long as the propositions are true, the conclusion must be true. Because dogheads have souls we should try and convert them. An argument can still be valid even when the conclusion is false, if one of the propositions is false.
All men have beards
Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates has a beard
The scholastic paradigm assumed that the ultimate truth was found in uncovering God's perspective as outlined in the Bible. It also assumed that there were mysteries of the universe that could never be understood. The medieval deductive arguments were valid, but could result in false conclusions because they were based on questionable propositions such as the existence of 'dogheads' or that the earth is the centre of the universe.
Galileo
When Galileo posited a heliocentric view of the solar system, he was going further than Copernicus and Kepler (who worked out that planets do not orbit in perfect circles), because his conclusions were based on observations and measurements. These measurements were made possible by technological developments in optics that enabled Galileo to observe and measure the movement of the planets in ways that had previously been impossible. It also made Galileo very dangerous to the Catholic church, because his conclusions were not simply propositions or theories but rather they were proven by observation. This was a humanist perspective that suggested that the truth was to be uncovered by human observation of the natural world. This required a different type of reasoning, inductive logic. This would form the basis of the Scientific Revolution.
Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument may only be probable, based upon the evidence given. It is the weight of evidence that matters. The great 20th century Austrian/British philosopher Karl Popper summarized this uncertainty with the principle of empirical falsification (see IB TOK later). Scientific laws can never be proven, but they should be assumed to be true until proven otherwise (falsified). The basic method of inductive reasoning is the scientific method, which you are all familiar with and which was developed at the start of the Scientific Revolution by Francis Bacon.
When Galileo posited a heliocentric view of the solar system, he was going further than Copernicus and Kepler (who worked out that planets do not orbit in perfect circles), because his conclusions were based on observations and measurements. These measurements were made possible by technological developments in optics that enabled Galileo to observe and measure the movement of the planets in ways that had previously been impossible. It also made Galileo very dangerous to the Catholic church, because his conclusions were not simply propositions or theories but rather they were proven by observation. This was a humanist perspective that suggested that the truth was to be uncovered by human observation of the natural world. This required a different type of reasoning, inductive logic. This would form the basis of the Scientific Revolution.
Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument may only be probable, based upon the evidence given. It is the weight of evidence that matters. The great 20th century Austrian/British philosopher Karl Popper summarized this uncertainty with the principle of empirical falsification (see IB TOK later). Scientific laws can never be proven, but they should be assumed to be true until proven otherwise (falsified). The basic method of inductive reasoning is the scientific method, which you are all familiar with and which was developed at the start of the Scientific Revolution by Francis Bacon.
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Activity 1 - The Scientific Revolution
There are lots of important complex ideas in this section. It is important that you take time to make your own notes in order to help your understanding. Answer the following questions and try to put as much as possible into your own words. 1. What was medieval scholasticism? Use examples from the Bartlett video to help explain your answer. 2. How was humanism different to medieval thinking, why was it a new 'paradigm shift'? 3. What is the difference between deductive and inductive logic? Provide your own example of deductive logic in which a valid argument provides a false conclusion like this famous one: All men have beards Socrates is a man Therefore, Socrates has a beard As you will learn in critical thinking or TOK this is called a logical fallacy. |
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Extension activity
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Where do good ideas come from? - Steven Johnson
Although not restricted to the scientific revolution, in his book Steven Johnson examines the environments which help us explain 'Where do good ideas come from?' The Scientific Revolution happened in a particular place and particular time good reasons. Innovation happens within the bounds of the adjacent possible, in other words the realm of possibilities available at any given moment. Great leaps beyond the adjacent possible are rare and doomed to be short-term failures. Had YouTube been launched in the 1990s, it would have flopped, since neither the fast internet connections nor the software required to view videos was available then. The Scientific Revolution needed rise of nation states, the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, microscopes and the telescope... amongst other things. Steven Johnson also produced a series of films on innovation that apply many of the key ideas in this lesson. |
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Part 2 - The Scientists
As well as producing lots of exciting new ideas, the scientific revolution also produced a roll-call of heroic individuals who often lived through some dramatic times.
The best place to begin is with one of the parents of scientific revolution Galileo. A little while ago I visited the Galileo museum in Florence. It is an impressive place with many beautiful exhibits. But for me this was the most interesting. It didn't look like much and most people walked straight passed. This is Galileo's telescope, it might be argued that the scientific revolution began with this.
Who were the scientists? - A Diamond 9 activity
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Francis Bacon (1561-1626) – The Man Who Told Science How to Think
Francis Bacon grew up in England surrounded by books, but he quickly decided that books were part of the problem. Everyone kept quoting Aristotle instead of studying the world itself. “Why trust ancient authors,” he asked, “when nature is right in front of us?” Bacon proposed a new approach: observe carefully, record results, test ideas with experiments, and repeat the process. It sounds obvious today, but in the early 1600s it was revolutionary. He called this method induction, building knowledge from evidence rather than starting with assumptions. Although Bacon himself was not a great experimental scientist (he famously caught pneumonia while trying to freeze a chicken in the snow), his ideas reshaped the development of modern science. Every science experiment you have ever done follows a structure Bacon imagined centuries earlier.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – The Rebel with a Telescope
Galileo lived in Italy at a time when the Church claimed authority over the heavens. In 1609 he heard that Dutch sailors were using a mysterious tube that made distant objects seem close. Within days he built his own, and within weeks he pointed it at the sky. What he saw changed history: mountains on the Moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, and countless stars in the Milky Way. These discoveries directly contradicted the Church-supported belief that the heavens were perfect and that everything revolved around the Earth. His book The Starry Messenger caused a sensation and outrage. Church authorities ordered him to stop defending Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. Galileo tried to outmanoeuvre them by writing dialogues instead of arguments, but he was eventually put on trial. Forced to recant, he spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Yet the telescope he built made the Earth move forever.
William Harvey (1578-1657) – The Man Who Followed the Blood
William Harvey, a quiet English physician, did not believe the ancient Greek doctor Galen’s claim that blood was “used up” by the body and constantly remade in the liver. The maths simply didn’t work. So Harvey turned to experiment. He inserted wires into veins, dissected living frogs to watch their beating hearts, and tied string tightly around arms and arteries to see how blood reacted. Slowly he realised something astonishing: blood circulates. It travels out from the heart through arteries and returns through veins, moving in one continuous loop. His 1628 book explaining circulation shocked Europe. Many doctors refused to accept it because it overturned 1,400 years of medical teaching. But Harvey’s method, careful observation, repeated tests, and measurable results, became a model of modern scientific thinking.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – The Philosopher Who Tried to Doubt Everything
René Descartes was a French soldier-turned-philosopher who one icy winter’s night began a radical experiment: doubt everything. Could his senses be tricking him? Could he be dreaming? Was anything certain at all? Only one thing seemed impossible to doubt: the act of doubting itself. From this came his famous conclusion, Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes imagined the universe as a perfectly designed machine created by God and running according to mathematical laws. He believed the senses were unreliable and that true knowledge came from reason and deduction. Ironically, the man who believed in calm, rational thinking died in Sweden because Queen Christina insisted on meeting for philosophy lessons at 5 a.m. in the freezing dark.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) – The Merchant Who Found an Invisible World
Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch cloth-merchant with no university training, but he became fascinated by magnifying glasses used to check fabric threads. He began grinding his own tiny lenses and invented powerful single-lens microscopes that he kept secret. One day, looking at a drop of pond water, he saw something no human had ever seen: tiny organisms swimming, twisting, and multiplying. He called them “animalcules”. Today we call them bacteria and protozoa. He went on to describe blood cells, sperm cells, microscopic crystals, and capillary blood flow. At first scientists didn’t believe him. His lenses were so good that nobody else could reproduce his view. Yet through letters to the Royal Society, he introduced Europe to an entire hidden universe. Modern biology begins with this curious Dutchman peering into a drop of water.
Robert Hooke (1635-1703)– The Forgotten Genius of the Microscope
Robert Hooke was an English scientist whose curiosity never stopped moving. As curator of experiments for the Royal Society, he investigated gravity, heat, fossils, astronomy, engineering, and architecture, often all in the same week. His 1665 masterpiece Micrographia astonished readers with its stunning illustrations made through his compound microscope. Hooke revealed a new miniature world of insects, plants, and structures. He coined the word “cell” after observing the honeycomb-like patterns in cork. Hooke suggested that fossils were the remains of ancient life and that matter expands when heated. He proposed that light behaves as a wave and that air is made of tiny particles. But his bitter rivalry with Isaac Newton destroyed his reputation. After Hooke’s death, Newton, now President of the Royal Society, allowed Hooke’s portrait to vanish, and for centuries his contributions were overshadowed. Today, historians recognise Hooke as one of the most inventive minds of the Scientific Revolution.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – The Man Who Explained the Universe
Isaac Newton grew up an isolated child in rural England, building mechanical toys to escape family troubles. At Cambridge he was brilliant but private, studying mostly alone. When the Great Plague forced the university to close in 1665, Newton returned home for two years, the most productive in scientific history. There he invented calculus, developed a new type of telescope, and began thinking about why objects fall. The apple story is partly true: seeing an apple fall made him wonder why everything accelerates downward. His 1687 book Principia Mathematica united celestial and earthly motion through three mathematical laws and the universal law of gravity. Suddenly planets, falling apples, and tides all followed the same principles. Voltaire wrote that Newton had revealed the “clockwork of Creation.” Newton simply said he stood “on the shoulders of giants”, though one of those giants, Robert Hooke, may not have agreed.
Maria Sibylla Merian (German–Dutch, 1647–1717) – The Woman Who Followed Insects Into the Jungle
Maria Sibylla Merian was a German-born naturalist and artist who challenged one of the most stubborn beliefs in early modern science: that insects simply “appeared” out of mud, meat or rotting plants. From childhood she collected caterpillars in boxes and carefully recorded their transformations. She painted every stage in exquisite detail, egg, larva, pupa, butterfly, demonstrating that insects had complex life cycles rather than magical origins. At the age of 52, when most Europeans never travelled beyond their home city, Merian undertook a dangerous two-year scientific expedition to Suriname in South America. In the heat and disease of the rainforest she observed insects feeding, hunting and metamorphosing in real time. Her book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium astonished Europe with its vivid plates and evidence-based natural history. Merian’s commitment to fieldwork, observation and classification placed her alongside Hooke, Leeuwenhoek and Linnaeus as a pioneer of biological science. She helped shift the study of life from myths to measurable reality.
Karl von Linné (1707-1778) – The Man Who Named the Living World
Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, loved order more than anything. Long before becoming a scientist, he spent his childhood in his father’s garden, giving unofficial names to flowers and insects. By adulthood he faced a major scientific problem: the natural world was a chaotic mess of long, inconsistent Latin descriptions. Nobody could keep track of species. Linnaeus solved it with elegant simplicity: every living organism would receive two names, genus and species. Homo sapiens. Panthera leo. Rosa canina. He travelled widely across Sweden and Lapland, recording plants, animals, rocks, and even the hunting customs of the Sámi people. His students, known as his “apostles”, were sent around the globe to collect specimens, a risky mission that some never survived. Linnaeus believed he was organising God’s creation. Modern scientists consider him the father of taxonomy, the man who brought order to nature.
Francis Bacon grew up in England surrounded by books, but he quickly decided that books were part of the problem. Everyone kept quoting Aristotle instead of studying the world itself. “Why trust ancient authors,” he asked, “when nature is right in front of us?” Bacon proposed a new approach: observe carefully, record results, test ideas with experiments, and repeat the process. It sounds obvious today, but in the early 1600s it was revolutionary. He called this method induction, building knowledge from evidence rather than starting with assumptions. Although Bacon himself was not a great experimental scientist (he famously caught pneumonia while trying to freeze a chicken in the snow), his ideas reshaped the development of modern science. Every science experiment you have ever done follows a structure Bacon imagined centuries earlier.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – The Rebel with a Telescope
Galileo lived in Italy at a time when the Church claimed authority over the heavens. In 1609 he heard that Dutch sailors were using a mysterious tube that made distant objects seem close. Within days he built his own, and within weeks he pointed it at the sky. What he saw changed history: mountains on the Moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, and countless stars in the Milky Way. These discoveries directly contradicted the Church-supported belief that the heavens were perfect and that everything revolved around the Earth. His book The Starry Messenger caused a sensation and outrage. Church authorities ordered him to stop defending Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. Galileo tried to outmanoeuvre them by writing dialogues instead of arguments, but he was eventually put on trial. Forced to recant, he spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Yet the telescope he built made the Earth move forever.
William Harvey (1578-1657) – The Man Who Followed the Blood
William Harvey, a quiet English physician, did not believe the ancient Greek doctor Galen’s claim that blood was “used up” by the body and constantly remade in the liver. The maths simply didn’t work. So Harvey turned to experiment. He inserted wires into veins, dissected living frogs to watch their beating hearts, and tied string tightly around arms and arteries to see how blood reacted. Slowly he realised something astonishing: blood circulates. It travels out from the heart through arteries and returns through veins, moving in one continuous loop. His 1628 book explaining circulation shocked Europe. Many doctors refused to accept it because it overturned 1,400 years of medical teaching. But Harvey’s method, careful observation, repeated tests, and measurable results, became a model of modern scientific thinking.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) – The Philosopher Who Tried to Doubt Everything
René Descartes was a French soldier-turned-philosopher who one icy winter’s night began a radical experiment: doubt everything. Could his senses be tricking him? Could he be dreaming? Was anything certain at all? Only one thing seemed impossible to doubt: the act of doubting itself. From this came his famous conclusion, Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes imagined the universe as a perfectly designed machine created by God and running according to mathematical laws. He believed the senses were unreliable and that true knowledge came from reason and deduction. Ironically, the man who believed in calm, rational thinking died in Sweden because Queen Christina insisted on meeting for philosophy lessons at 5 a.m. in the freezing dark.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) – The Merchant Who Found an Invisible World
Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch cloth-merchant with no university training, but he became fascinated by magnifying glasses used to check fabric threads. He began grinding his own tiny lenses and invented powerful single-lens microscopes that he kept secret. One day, looking at a drop of pond water, he saw something no human had ever seen: tiny organisms swimming, twisting, and multiplying. He called them “animalcules”. Today we call them bacteria and protozoa. He went on to describe blood cells, sperm cells, microscopic crystals, and capillary blood flow. At first scientists didn’t believe him. His lenses were so good that nobody else could reproduce his view. Yet through letters to the Royal Society, he introduced Europe to an entire hidden universe. Modern biology begins with this curious Dutchman peering into a drop of water.
Robert Hooke (1635-1703)– The Forgotten Genius of the Microscope
Robert Hooke was an English scientist whose curiosity never stopped moving. As curator of experiments for the Royal Society, he investigated gravity, heat, fossils, astronomy, engineering, and architecture, often all in the same week. His 1665 masterpiece Micrographia astonished readers with its stunning illustrations made through his compound microscope. Hooke revealed a new miniature world of insects, plants, and structures. He coined the word “cell” after observing the honeycomb-like patterns in cork. Hooke suggested that fossils were the remains of ancient life and that matter expands when heated. He proposed that light behaves as a wave and that air is made of tiny particles. But his bitter rivalry with Isaac Newton destroyed his reputation. After Hooke’s death, Newton, now President of the Royal Society, allowed Hooke’s portrait to vanish, and for centuries his contributions were overshadowed. Today, historians recognise Hooke as one of the most inventive minds of the Scientific Revolution.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – The Man Who Explained the Universe
Isaac Newton grew up an isolated child in rural England, building mechanical toys to escape family troubles. At Cambridge he was brilliant but private, studying mostly alone. When the Great Plague forced the university to close in 1665, Newton returned home for two years, the most productive in scientific history. There he invented calculus, developed a new type of telescope, and began thinking about why objects fall. The apple story is partly true: seeing an apple fall made him wonder why everything accelerates downward. His 1687 book Principia Mathematica united celestial and earthly motion through three mathematical laws and the universal law of gravity. Suddenly planets, falling apples, and tides all followed the same principles. Voltaire wrote that Newton had revealed the “clockwork of Creation.” Newton simply said he stood “on the shoulders of giants”, though one of those giants, Robert Hooke, may not have agreed.
Maria Sibylla Merian (German–Dutch, 1647–1717) – The Woman Who Followed Insects Into the Jungle
Maria Sibylla Merian was a German-born naturalist and artist who challenged one of the most stubborn beliefs in early modern science: that insects simply “appeared” out of mud, meat or rotting plants. From childhood she collected caterpillars in boxes and carefully recorded their transformations. She painted every stage in exquisite detail, egg, larva, pupa, butterfly, demonstrating that insects had complex life cycles rather than magical origins. At the age of 52, when most Europeans never travelled beyond their home city, Merian undertook a dangerous two-year scientific expedition to Suriname in South America. In the heat and disease of the rainforest she observed insects feeding, hunting and metamorphosing in real time. Her book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium astonished Europe with its vivid plates and evidence-based natural history. Merian’s commitment to fieldwork, observation and classification placed her alongside Hooke, Leeuwenhoek and Linnaeus as a pioneer of biological science. She helped shift the study of life from myths to measurable reality.
Karl von Linné (1707-1778) – The Man Who Named the Living World
Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, loved order more than anything. Long before becoming a scientist, he spent his childhood in his father’s garden, giving unofficial names to flowers and insects. By adulthood he faced a major scientific problem: the natural world was a chaotic mess of long, inconsistent Latin descriptions. Nobody could keep track of species. Linnaeus solved it with elegant simplicity: every living organism would receive two names, genus and species. Homo sapiens. Panthera leo. Rosa canina. He travelled widely across Sweden and Lapland, recording plants, animals, rocks, and even the hunting customs of the Sámi people. His students, known as his “apostles”, were sent around the globe to collect specimens, a risky mission that some never survived. Linnaeus believed he was organising God’s creation. Modern scientists consider him the father of taxonomy, the man who brought order to nature.
Activity 2 - Who were the scientists? A Diamond9 activity.
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In this activity, you will explore the lives and discoveries of nine scientists from the Scientific Revolution and decide who made the biggest difference to the story of how the world changed.
There is no single correct answer. What matters is your reasoning. Do not worry yet about definitions or criteria. Use your instincts. Think about: impact, long-term change, new ideas, breakthroughs, risks, dramatic turning points. |
Under your Diamond 9, write brief explanations for:
- Your top scientists. Why are they at the top? What kind of change did they create? How big was that change? How long did it last?
- Your bottom scientists. Why did they have less impact compared to others? Was their contribution smaller, shorter-term, or less influential?
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Extension activities
You never have to do extension suggestions, I just suggest them to extend you, if you feel like being extended. For this unit I recommend some reading. Probably the most readable books on the history of the scientific revolution are Dava Sobel's Longitude, the story of John Harrison an English clockmaker who solved the problem of how to measure longitude at sea and Galileo's Daughter which brilliantly captures a relationship and time: plague, Thirty Years' War and the Medicis. Longitude was also made into an outstanding TV film, very long, it is ideal for any long car journeys you may have coming up. |
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Alternatively, watch the film about Galileo.
(a) How did Galileo prove the theories of Copernicus and Kepler? (b) How did Galileo get around the injunction not to write in support of Copernicus? (c) Why was Pope Urban VIII so upset by Galileo and why did he feel the need to take action? (d) How did Galileo defend himself? (e) Why in the end did Galileo confess, with what consequences for him and his book? |
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