Scientific revolution

"Science as subversion has a long history. ...Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children. ...We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice."

"Although many historians of the new millennium now take issue with the notion of a Scientific Revolution, it is generally agreed that Newtons work culminated the long development of European science, creating a synthesis that opened the way for the scientific culture of the modern age."

"The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions."

"the Scientific Revolution might prove itself far greater than a mere historical revolution. It may turn out to be the most important bological revolution since the appearance of life on earth."

"Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, natural, historical method."

"The Portuguese had undertaken their voyages towards the southern hemisphere in spite of the science of their day... they followed an irresistible urge, which went against their scientific and religious convictions."

"Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds of people who, on the one hand, by their humanistic education, not only knew better but also more uncritically admired, ancient learning than their medieval predecessors, and, who, on the other hand, in the same epoch, were confronted with abundant proofs of the insufficiency and fallibility of that same Antiquity."

"In Newtons time only two kinds of force were available for quantitative investigation. One was the force of gravity; the other the forces of push and pull encountered in everyday life... Newton endeavored to construct a general theory of all forces, both those known in his time and those that might be discovered and investigated later. He intended his theory of gravitation to be one example that he himself could work out fully... Newton formulated his celebrated three laws: (1) In the absence of force, a body will continue at rest or in its present state of uniform rectilinear motion. (2) In the presence of force, a body will be accelerated in the direction of that force, the product of its mass by its acceleration being equal to the force (f = ma). (3) To every force there corresponds an equal counterforce, acting in a direction opposite to that of the force... According to the third law, then, each planet exerts an attractive counterforce to the sun, accelerating it toward the planet... a relatively small acceleration, because the mass of the sun so vastly exceeds... every planet..."

"The pioneering practitioners of the new science knew that they were producing a new kind of knowledge and so they declared this newness in the titles of their books and articles. Thus we have Galileos Two New Sciences, Boyles New Experiments, Keplers New Astronomy, and Tartaglias New Science. When Ben Jonson presented a masque entitled "News from the New World," his new world was not the newly found continent of North America, but the new world of science, the world revealed by the telescope of Galileo."

"[L]ong ago have those doctrines been exploded of the Force of the First Mover and the Solidity of the Heaven,—the stars being supposed to be fixed in their orbs like nails in a roof. And with no better reason is it affirmed, that there are different poles of the zodiac and of the world; that there is a Second Mover of counteraction to the force of the first; that all the heavenly bodies move in perfect circles; that there are eccentrics and epicycles whereby the constancy of motions in perfect circles is preserved; that the moon works no change or violence in the regions above it: and the like. And it is the absurdity of these opinions that has driven men to the of the earth; which I am convinced is most false. But there is scarce any one who has made inquiries into the physical causes, as well of the substance of the heavens both stellar and interstellar..."

"The modern origins of empirical scientific knowledge lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This time period, known as the Scientific Revolution, saw advances such as Newtons theory of gravitation, Boyles gas laws, Hookes recognition that all living things are made of cells, and the beginning of the Royal Society... The spirit that infused this time period brought forth a whole host of new knowledge, and the disproving of facts that had existed for centuries, if not millennia. ...some of the most important components of this endeavor were to try to eliminate errors and create a means of spreading correct facts. Many of the papers presented in the early years of the Royal Society were devoted to trying to understand errors, to root out misunderstandings, or to test the veracity of tales told to them that often seemed too good to be true. ...Most important, they didnt keep this new knowledge secret. They spread it far and wide, publishing it and disseminating it through the loose network of natural philosophers of Europe."

"The seventeenth century witnessed the birth of modern science as we know it today. The science was something new, based on a direct confrontation of nature by experiment and observation. But there was another feature of the new science—a dependence on numbers, on real numbers of actual experience. ...The ancients knew a few numerical laws... But prior to the Scientific Revolution, the goal of science (or the study of nature) was not to seek laws of nature expressed in terms of numbers or number relations. ...the new science ...not only found laws based on numbers but they were also willing to express these laws in terms of higher powers of numbers—squares and cubes."