Europe and the Scientific Revolution essays

Europe and the Scientific Revolution essays The Scientific Revolution brought many new ideas and beliefs not only to Europe but the entire world. The most widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the "Scientific Revolution." In the popular mind, we associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but the scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly changed the human experience of every other aspect of life, from individual life to the life of the group. This modification in worldview can also be charted in painting, sculpture, and architecture; you can see that people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are looking at the world very differently. The Scientific Revolution brought about many changed in both biology and astron omy. The former was concerned with the basics of physiology and anatomy; the latter was concerned with the issue of the solar system. These (and other) developments tended to proceed along independent lines until the great scientific academies of the 18th century both brought them together and helped spread their findings to the rest of society. Copernicus was a man who played a significant role in this revolution. Before Copernicus was the Ptolemaic system. Ptolemy's model of the universe was accepted throughout the Middle Ages, though not without revision. His model was a little ragged at the edges and more accurate observations revealed discrepancies, particularly in regard to the movement of the planets. Using tables based on Ptolemy's model, medieval astronomers made predictions regarding the position of this or that planet and the planets did not show up on time. Even Ptolemy had known that the simplest model, which had each planet moving in a cir...