Scientific Revolution - How Revolutionary Was It?

[Lord Chambers]

I'm a fan of big questions that have no satisfactory answers rather than the narrow ones like "who had the best tanks in WW2?"

The scientific revolution didn't impact the lives of everyday people as much as the Industrial revolution. Perhaps even less so than the current "information age" we're supposedly living in. Does that make it less important?

What about its contribution to the course of history? In this light, one could make the arguement that the Scientific Revolution was the most important of all.

How revolutionary was it?

 

[Plotinus]

What period are you talking about, exactly? The time of Galileo? Or Newton? Or Laplace? Or...?

 

[Taliesin]

I'm studying it right now. My professor's position is that the Scientific Revolution can be boiled down to 1687 and the publication of Newton's Principia, the sharp synthesis of everything that came before him-- Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, etc. The really novel feature of the Newtonian synthesis is that the various theories of gravitation and astronomy, none of which were really original to Newton, were tied up in one and, for the first time, given a solid grounding in mathematics. That was revolutionary. Unfortunately, of course, the Principia was obscure beyond the ken of all but a few academics, and it's true that the knell it sounded didn't penetrate public consciousness until a couple of popularisers emerged in the 18th century-- and even then, it only gained much ground on the Continent, the English being slow to catch on to it.

One basic problem that prevented the new system from catching on much was that it is profoundly counterintuitive. We take it for granted that the Earth spins and revolves elliptically around the Sun, but prima facie it's a pretty wacky claim, one for which there were plenty of common-sense detractors. If you throw a rock straight up, it doesn't arc off to the east. If you're on a ship leaving port, we generally agree that the ship is receding from the stationary dock, and not vice versa.

Another important product of the S.R. was the idea of force as a distinct thing, one without a spiritual explanation. The planets move because of gravity, or because God pushes them, but not because they are animated by a principle of motion or a planet-soul. To hear my prof tell it, this single idea is partly responsible for the rise of communism, fascism, and eugenics, by way of Enlightenment materialism. I'm not sure quite what to make of that claim, but it still seems an important point.

 

[Plotinus]

Another important product of the S.R. was the idea of force as a distinct thing, one without a spiritual explanation. The planets move because of gravity, or because God pushes them, but not because they are animated by a principle of motion or a planet-soul. To hear my prof tell it, this single idea is partly responsible for the rise of communism, fascism, and eugenics, by way of Enlightenment materialism. I'm not sure quite what to make of that claim, but it still seems an important point.

I must admit that I don't quite see what's revolutionary about this. Medieval philosophers were perfectly happy to talk about the qualities of an object without invoking spiritual explanations. Indeed, surely one of Leibniz' main objections to Newton's theory of gravity was that it shared precisely this characteristic with medieval metaphysics, being simply another word for the fact that certain phenomena occur, without providing any actual explanation for them.

There's a good case to be made for saying that the real revolution in thought came with William of Ockham and his belief that knowledge is primarily of individuals and only secondarily of universals, a reversal of the standard scholastic position that essentially paved the way for scientific investigation. But I'm not going to make that case now!

 

[Taliesin]

Oh, certainly it wasn't original to Newton. Materialistic force as a concept was present in Spinoza, and Leibniz definitely objected to Newton's Spinozan tendencies.

I confess that I am not committed to this idea, though, as it was just given as something of a throwaway point in lecture today. I know that the mediaevals talked about properties of objects without resorting to spirit, but I think the point might be more that Newton accounted for planetary behaviour in terms of invisible and universal force regardless of objects, rather than of properties intrinsic to objects. That seems novel to me (although, granted, it's a bit of a cop-out as far as accounts go).

 

[Che Guava]

I always thought that the 'revolutionary' part of the scientific revolution was its objective methodology. It's all well and good for Aristotle to talk about the nature of objects and why they fall to the earth, but his were simply ideas: they were not tested in a straightforward and objective way. When Newton described force and energy, he did it using hypotheses, strict methods and objective proofs. That, IMHO, was the revolution.

As for the industrial revolution, I always viewed that as the application scientific revolution (science to technology) although I'm sure there was much more to it than that..!

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

I'm a fan of big questions that have no satisfactory answers rather than the narrow ones like "who had the best tanks in WW2?"

The scientific revolution didn't impact the lives of everyday people as much as the Industrial revolution. Perhaps even less so than the current "information age" we're supposedly living in. Does that make it less important?

What about its contribution to the course of history? In this light, one could make the arguement that the Scientific Revolution was the most important of all.

How revolutionary was it?

I assume you're talking about the revolution between the 17th and 18th centuries. The scientific revolution didn't really impact technological pace until probably the turn of the 20th century. The revolution was a paradigm shift in human reasoning. It validated that analytical reason was superior to other forms of judgement. You start seeing rational approaches to more things afterwards, like politics and economics. Of course it led to further scientific discoveries that were based on earlier ones, but this had only a tenuous public effect.

 

[Plotinus]

It validated that analytical reason was superior to other forms of judgement. You start seeing rational approaches to more things afterwards, like politics and economics.

What do you mean by "analytical reason"? To me, that means maths, not science. Science is empirical, not analytic.

Similarly, I don't see how people after the eighteenth century were any more rational than those before. Bentham's political writings may be very different from Aquinas' - but they're no more rational, are they?

 

[Lord Chambers]

What period are you talking about, exactly? The time of Galileo? Or Newton? Or Laplace? Or...?

16th and 17th centuries. Copernicus to Newton lets say.

I assume you're talking about the revolution between the 17th and 18th centuries. The scientific revolution didn't really impact technological pace until probably the turn of the 20th century.

I understand why you would think this, but I'm really not directing the question toward technology. Here's why I brought up the industrial revolution and computer revolution.

Criteria. In answering the question "how revolutionary was it" you need criteria. And really the only criteria that seems valid to me is to try and measure a revolution's depth; how far down the social strata it impacted people. Take something that is generally agreed to qualify as a revolution; industrialization. What makes it revolutionary? There were technologies before that increased production, but what makes the supposed Industrial Revolution remarkable was the way a few (steam power, spinning jennies and whatnot) combined to start off a major lifestyle change for the downtrodden masses. Their lives, which consisted largely of agriculture for thousands of years, changed to become a life of labor and living in cities. Industrialization changed the entire dynamic of lives, and changed it for a majority of people. Contrast this to a "revolution" that might only change the lives of a few hundred elite in a geographically unimportant section of the planet. Say, a emperor who decides to kill all the members of the previous oligarchy. Does that qualify as a revolution? For most people I don't think it would. These kinds of kill-offs are kind of standard. We only study and name the major ones that happen to have powerful and far-reaching effects. So, the best explanation I can come up for why Industrialization is a revolution while other events are not is because when people speak of revolution, they're speaking of depth: how far down the social ladder an event causes change.

It's for this reason I think the scientific revolution barely qualifies, if at all. In its time period, it did very little to impact lives except for the upper class urbanites who read that kind of stuff. Surely it was the start of a new way of seeing things, as Nanocyborgasm pointed to, it impacted not only science, but the way people viewed economics and politics. This is not to be underestimated. But every historical event or trend has its root somewhere, and it's unfair to call them all revolutions. Since the importance of these 16th and 17th century developments only became realized in the 20th century (when it was first termed the "scientific revolution" Koyre in 1939) it seems teleological to go "look at where we are! *pointing* It started back there! It's a revolution." In that sense, everything is a revolution. The blossoming of trade during the early middle ages would be the Financial Revolution. It was a pathetic amount compared to later centuries, but hey, look at the way global trade is operating today and how it impacts all of our lives. It started back then! Or the spread of Confucius's teachings could be called the Early Chinese Communist Revolution, because of its anti-progressive stance that set China up for European exploitation and eventually on a path to Communism in the 20th. It started back then!

Obviously many intelligent historians have adopted the idea that what happened between Copernicus and Newton was truly deserving of recognition as a revolution. My thoughts then, must be that they have different criteria on what makes something revolutionary. I go for depth, but I was hoping in this thread to find out what other criteria people thought was valid.

 

[onejayhawk]

Is "revolution" the correct word? "Evolution" seems more to the point, but its, shall we day, taken. Paradigm shift, to use Nano's term is a bit narrow, but much closer. There are extremely diverse aspects, which must be considered as part of the whole, including things like farming, sculpture, philosophy, banking etc. Of course the basis of it all is in mathematics, which is why, among other things, Newton's "Principia Mathematica" is so important.

One critical aspect was when science became acknowledges as a legitimate field of study, on par with law and theology. In that regard the emergence of chemistry as a major moneymaking force is crucial. On that wealth was born the German nation.

J

 

[cyrusIII85]

I find basing the term "Scientific Revolution" to the West only to be slightly insulting concerning the efforts of non-Westerners. Persians, Indians, and Arabs all contributed vastly to the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, optics, and somewhat to physics. As such, since I view the "Scientific Revolution" as a mere transfer of the focus on analytical and physical studies from the East to the West, that the real "revolution" happened throughout the pre-Islamic era through the European era. Of course, beginning and ending the "revolution" period is problematic.

Usually, one usually thinks of a "revolution" as spontaneous and chaotic, when in fact the scientific progress was very much drawn out and methodical. In the end, I too find the term and meaning to be flawed. And I have seen this discussion come up before in other forums I have visited, so this debate is by no means unique...

 

[Lord Chambers]

I find basing the term "Scientific Revolution" to the West only to be slightly insulting concerning the efforts of non-Westerners. Persians, Indians, and Arabs all contributed vastly to the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, optics, and somewhat to physics. As such, since I view the "Scientific Revolution" as a mere transfer of the focus on analytical and physical studies from the East to the West, that the real "revolution" happened throughout the pre-Islamic era through the European era.

This is interesting and is something I'd like to bring into the paper I'm writing. Can you elaborate on specifics, or perhaps point me to other sources? Specifically how non-westerners had already moved to a mechanistic view of nature and used experimentation and demonstration, seeing as those are the points that authors argue make the Scientific Revolution signifigant, not that lots of progress was made in biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, optics, and physics.

 

[Verbose]

As far as I know "the scientific revolution" didn't crop up in academic circles until around the 1950's.
Historians of science like Butterfield, Koyré et al. coined it as a nice catch-phrase for summing up what they considered considerable change in the 16th, 17th c.s
It got a further boost by Kuhn's invention of "the paradigm" in the 1960's to describe the radical break in astronomy — Copernicus/Kepler/Gallileo/Newton you know.

"The scientific rev." is a way of framing considerable changes in basic assumptions about reality over a period of time (150 years or so, pretty long actually).

Mostly I'd look to stuff like the rise of quantitative and materialist science (Descartes) — Newton's use of time (it's absolute; to the Medievals and Cartesians alike time was relative) — the experimental method at the Royal Society (Boyle), but not just the experiments themselves, but the whole system of witnessing and reporting experiments (first scientific journal).

And the you can always pick up Steven Shapin's book "The Scientific Revolution" where he pretty much argues that the Sci. Rev. wasn't as revolutionary as all that (but still worth writing a book about).

 

[cyrusIII85]

This is interesting and is something I'd like to bring into the paper I'm writing. Can you elaborate on specifics, or perhaps point me to other sources? Specifically how non-westerners had already moved to a mechanistic view of nature and used experimentation and demonstration, seeing as those are the points that authors argue make the Scientific Revolution signifigant, not that lots of progress was made in biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, optics, and physics.

Um...well I can try to get some books on the matter. Of course, I can direct you to some sites I found Googling...

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_science#Mathematics

It states that the scientific method was developed by an guy who worked in optics. I've been confused of late whether he is Iranian or Arab, so I guess the term "Islamic" would do.

2.http://www.cgcu.net/imase/islam_science_philosophy.htm

This once again shows the scientific method orginated in the Islamic era.

3. http://www.islamabad.net/science.htm

4. http://www.scientificmethod.co.uk/

You have to remember that alot of these sites simply say "Arab", when alot of those guys are Persian or even have Persian heritage, and they also completely neglect the Indians who produced very good works in the same era. Little known fact: there were alot of Persians in Iraq at the time of the Islamic invasions. As a result, simply because a scholar lived in Iraq, doesn't necceraily mean they were Arab. There parents, or they themselves, could have moved to Iraq from Iran, or they had Persian heritage. So, when reporting on these subjects, best to highlight the differences between these guys (Indian, Persian, Arab, etc.).

But, in the end, it's quite logical they had the systematic approach to problem solving, since it would be nearly impossible for people to develop as much in the same time period.

 

[Andu Indorin]

I find basing the term "Scientific Revolution" to the West only to be slightly insulting concerning the efforts of non-Westerners. Persians, Indians, and Arabs all contributed vastly to the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, optics, and somewhat to physics. As such, since I view the "Scientific Revolution" as a mere transfer of the focus on analytical and physical studies from the East to the West, that the real "revolution" happened throughout the pre-Islamic era through the European era. Of course, beginning and ending the "revolution" period is problematic.

Usually, one usually thinks of a "revolution" as spontaneous and chaotic, when in fact the scientific progress was very much drawn out and methodical. In the end, I too find the term and meaning to be flawed. And I have seen this discussion come up before in other forums I have visited, so this debate is by no means unique...

IIRC, Bernard Cohen in his "Revolutions in Science," points out that the term "Revolution" as applied to political and social phenomenon, is actually derived (and modified) from its scientific usage in astronomy. And this is traced, in part, to the "historical coincidence" of the publication of Newton's "Principia" and the "naming" of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688.

In general, when speaking of social changes ("Scientific Revolution", "Industrial Revolution", "Military Revolution", etc.), I find that the term almost always overstates the nature of the change. In other words, there is always that debate between "evolution" versus "revolution", of continuity versus discontinuity.

Still, as you point out, there is high degree Eurocentrism (i.e., the West) implicit in all of these so-called revolutions; and this does have the effect of understating the earlier accomplishments and contributions of non-Western civilizations.

 

[Ribannah]

One basic problem that prevented the new system from catching on much was that it is profoundly counterintuitive. We take it for granted that the Earth spins and revolves elliptically around the Sun

The Earth does not revolve elliptically around the Sun at all. In fact without a point of reference - which is always arbitrary - only the distance changes over time.

 

[cyrusIII85]

IIRC, Bernard Cohen in his "Revolutions in Science," points out that the term "Revolution" as applied to political and social phenomenon, is actually derived (and modified) from its scientific usage in astronomy. And this is traced, in part, to the "historical coincidence" of the publication of Newton's "Principia" and the "naming" of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688.

In general, when speaking of social changes ("Scientific Revolution", "Industrial Revolution", "Military Revolution", etc.), I find that the term almost always overstates the nature of the change. In other words, there is always that debate between "evolution" versus "revolution", of continuity versus discontinuity.

Yeah, I agree with what you are saying. It sort of ridiculous how the meanings sort of jump on who uses it. Of course, originally was used in astronomy, but then most probably it was used by sociologists and historians, in their effort to use scientific terms toward categorizing human behavior and systems, and then (maybe) it was used in broader contexts trying to describe less drastic changes. I'm only guessing, but I think that's how the meaning progressed.

One of the ways, in fact, I've always found the terms differentiated and easily separated was what you said: "continuity vs. discontinuity". I always find that if the change is gradual and "smooth" it can be refer to as evolution and vica versa. As such, the "industrial revolution" certainly was a revolution in the beginning in production, but applying to later years where there was a methodical progression of the technology which has already catched on in concept, I would view it more as an evolution.