A new way of thinking: The Birth of Modern Science
- some europeans were attempting to to spread the Christian faith to corners of the world, others nurturing cosmos at odds with Christian teachings
- Europe's Scientific Revolution
--> Creators: Copernicus from Poland, Galileo from Italy, Descartes from France, Newton from England
- Saw themselves as departing radically from older ways of thinking
- The long-term significance of the Scientific Revolution can hardly be overestimated
- Over the past several centuries, it has eroded religious belief and practice in the West, particularly among the well educated.
The Question of Origins: Why Europe?
- Why did the breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution occur in the first in Europe and during the early modern era?
- The realm of Islam had generated the most advanced science in the world during the centuries between 800 and 1400.
- China?
- Its elite culture of Confucianism was both sophisticated and secular, less burdened by religious dogma than in the Christian or Islam worlds.
- This legal revolution was based on the idea of a "corporation", a collective group of people that was treated as a unit, a legal person, with certain rights to regulate and control its own members.
Science as a Cultural Revolution
- Before the Scientific Revolution, educated Europeans held a view of the world that derived from Aristotle, perhaps the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers, and Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer who lived in Alexandria during the second century
- The initial breakthrough in the Scientific Revolution came from the Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, whose famous book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in the year of his death 1543
Looking Ahead: Science in the Nineteenth Century
- Modern science was a cumulative and self-critical enterprise, which in the nineteenth century and after was applied to new domains of human inquiry in ways that undermined some of the assumptions of the Enlightenment,
- Charles Darwin laid out a complex argument that all life was in constant change and that an endless and competitive struggle for survival over millions of years was constantly generated.
