[L]ong ago have those doctrines been exploded of the Force of the Firs — 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 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."