Scientific Revolution
HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
SPRING 1998
11 FEBRUARY
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
DICTIONARY TIME-LINES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this assignment you should learn to define and discuss the following
terms:
- Universal, Naturalists, Linnaeus, Species of Plants, Species, Charles
Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Theory of
Evolution, Galileo, optics, natural philosopher, Copernicus, On the
Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, Leonardo da Vinci, John Kepler, The New
Astronomy, Isaac Newton, The General Theory of Relativity, Laboratories, The
Age of Enlightenment,
You should also become familiar with the following issues:
- How was the Scientific Revolution connected with the Realist view of the
Universe?
- In what sense were the voyages of discovery and exploration the cause of
the Scientific Revolution?
- What aspects of "the European personality" contributed to the early
Scientific Revolution?
- How did the activities of Early Modern naturalists lead to the Theory of
Evolution?
- How did the needs of sixteenth-century sailors lead to Einstein's
General THeory of Relativity?
You might in addition consider the following question:
We often view
history in terms of great men and women who "make history." What have you
learned about Columbus, Darwin, Newton, Einstein, and other people who "made
history"? Is the course of events shaped by great men and women, or is it
something else?
TEXT
One of the defining characteristics of Westerners, at least to my mind, is
our penchant for collecting things: coins and stamps, certainly, but also
bottle-tops, matchbooks, postcards, burnt-out lightbulbs, butterflies, old auto
license plates, "depression ware", salt and pepper shakers, beetles, baseball
cards, autographs, hub caps, souvenir spoons, the names of ancestors ... the
list is endless. If it doesn't walk, we'll collect it. This is not to say the
people of other cultures do not collect because they do. Unlike Westerners,
however, they do not seem to share our overwhelming urge to "own the whole set!"
I don't know if you have ever noticed how powerful this drive is, but the people
who print and issue stamps have. And they have turned it into a multi-million
dollar business. When a country issues a series of, say, eight stamps, it may
print ten million each of seven of the denominations, but only a hundred
thousand of one of the stamps. None of the stamp collectors know in advance
which of the series is going to become the rare stamp, and so they buy of sheet
after sheet of inexpensive stamps in order to ensure that they are getting the
one stamp that will become valuable. Of course, they never use any of these
stamps, so the Post Offices make money without performing any service.
You might ask what this has to do with the Scientific Revolution. Well, when
the ships of the explorers and discoverers started coming back from far-off
lands, they brought many unusual things back with them. The thinkers of the time
were rationalists, as you know, and depended upon the idea that any thing could
be put in its proper category or universal, and that the laws
governing these universals were permanent and unchanging and could be known with
certainty. Imagine what some learned person of that period must have thought
when some traveller returned from distant parts showed him one of the souvenir
he had brought back -- a Venus flytrap. The thinker would have watched as the
little plant caught a fly and sat back to digest its meal, and he would have
thought about the categories of "plant" and "animal". There simply was no
category of "carnivorous plant" into which he could place the Venus flytrap, and
so he would have gone home to look for his drawing board because it was clear
that something had to be done. He might have stopped in to see one of his
colleagues who had grown distracted ever since an overseas merchant had given
him a trained gorilla. His colleague knew that "man" was defined as a bipedal
mammal, and his new guest was certainly that, but he also knew that "all men are
rational creatures," and he had been driving himself mad trying to strike up a
decent conversation with the gorilla.
Now these things are just imaginings for fun, but they can give you an idea
what was happening. What happens to the traditional universals when you have to
place so many new things into their proper category? Especially if these things
included butterflies as big as dinner plates, flying squirrels, tree-climbing
fish, chunks of glass mountains, balls that bounced higher than anything you had
ever seen before, stuff that you could toss in the fire and get drunk from just
by breathing the smoke, and so on and so forth.
This is where our urge to collect things and to own the whole set came to the
aid of Western Civilization. This was the great age of the
naturalists, men and women who studied Nature and collected
examples of immense variety. There were few wealthy houses in Europe that did
not boast its own "cabinet of curiosities" filled with whatever the owner
thought was strange or interesting -- shrunken heads, bits of meteorite, chunks
of galena, amber entrapping a primeval dragon fly in full flight, oddly shaped
glass that cast off rainbows, and the like. There were persons of leisure who
did not collect something or another. Some had thousands of dead butterflies
arranged and displayed in glass cases, and even hired people to travel to
Africa, Asia, or the Americas to get them more and more butterflies. Some
collected beetles, some learned to draw accurately and went out to draw colored
pictures of all of the different birds they could find, others had gardens in
which they planted every variety of rose, or sweet pea, or onion that they came
across. Everyone who collected things were constantly arranging and rearranging
their specimens to find the categories of which they were examples.
All of this activity began to become more organized in the mid-18th century
when Linnaeus, the director of the large garden maintained by a
quite wealthy collector of plants, published Species of Plants.
Linnaeus introduced a regular system of naming the categories into which people
were trying to name their specimens by naming the genus, or
family, into which a given plant belonged and further specifying it according to
its species (did you note the connection there?). We still use
that system. You are an example of Homo sapiens and sweet pea of
Lathyrus odoratus. Once things could be given orderly and standard names,
the process of classification became much easier. There was a problem, however.
The defining characteristic of a true species is that members on one species
cannot breed with those of another and produce fertile off-spring. Where in the
world had all of those species come from? Why would God have made a hundred
thousand different species of beetle, each differing from the other by only some
tiny detail? That problem was settled by Charles Darwin in 1859,
when he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection. The Realist system of manipulation of universals had once
again proven effective, and the Theory of Evolution caused members
of Western culture to reassess the nature of the universe and of their role in
it.
Then, of course, there were the astronomers. People had been fooling around
with optics and making eyeglasses for a long time, but the
increase of commerce and shipping required some way of seeing further than was
possible by the naked eye. So it was that an Italian natural
philosopher ("Science" was called "Natural Philosophy" until well into
the nineteenth century) by the name of Galileo, bought some Dutch
telescopes, claimed that he had invented them, and tried to sell them to the
government. That didn't work out, so, in 1609, he started observing the stars
and planets with one of his telescopes and was simply bowled over by what he
saw. He saw, among other things, that the Earth and the other planets all seemed
to revolve about the sun. This wasn't exactly breaking news, since a Polish
natural philosopher by the name of Copernicus had reached the same
conclusion, using reason alone, and published his findings in his book On
the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which had been published in
1543. Galileo saw a good deal more, some of which was not there, and he drew
some sweeping conclusions that led the Church to tell him to shut up. In my
personal opinion, Galileo was a self- promoting loudmouth who went around
claiming to have discovered things that other people had actually figured out
some time before. But he's become a symbol of the Scientific Revolution, just
like Leonardo da Vinci with his fresco of the Last Supper
and his plans for submarines, helicopters, and machine guns has become the
stereotype of the Renaissance man. Of course, da Vinci mixed his
materials badly, and The Last Supper keeps falling off the wall, and none
of his "inventions" would have worked. But Galileo and da Vinci are culture
heroes, and I'm only a History instructor, so how much is my opinion worth?
One thing that Galileo did accomplish was to popularize the use of the
telescope for observation of the stars. The modern science of Astronomy grew out
of that simple application. John Kepler, the astrologer for the
king of Bohemia, got himself a bigger telescope than Galileo had and began to
try to figure out the way that the planets revolve around the Sun. In 1609,
while Galileo was making his first "astounding discoveries", Kepler published
The New Astronomy and described the laws that appeared to govern
the movements of the planets: They revolve around the Sun in elliptical, not
circular orbits; their speed of revolution varied so that they passed through
equal degrees of arc in equal periods of time; and the time that they took to
complete their journey around the sun was proportional to the cube of their
average distance from the sun.
Kepler's findings fascinated a young man at Oxford, and he abandoned the
standard curriculum of his college to pursue natural philosophy. His name was
Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and he began to studied the mathematical
relationships between natural objects. In 1687, he published his book
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in which he
demonstrated that the orbits of the planets were determined by a mutual
attraction between them and the sun, and attraction that he called
gravity and determined to be governed by the mass of the two objects and
the square of the distance between them. He also suggested a set of simple laws,
known as Newton's Laws of Physics, to describe and explain any
motion in the Universe. One was that any force produced and equal force
operating in the opposite direction. Any of you who have fired a shotgun can
explain their one to your classmates. Another said that any moving object would
keep moving unless stopped by a force equal to its own motion. This may not seem
Earth-shaking, but these laws became the basis for the sciences of physics and
mechanics until, late in the nineteenth century, a young Swiss by the name of
Albert Einstein noticed that these laws did not work out exactly
when dealing with very large or very small objects or when dealing with objects
moving at very high speeds. He finally accounted for these differences in a
series of papers that he delivered between the years 1905 and 1912. In 1916, he
published The General Theory of Relativity in which he redefined
gravity as the result of space and time curving in the presence of mass. Again,
one might note that, like Copernicus and Darwin, Einstein was not an
experimental scientist, but what we might call a Nominalist. He reached his
conclusions on the basis of logic and its corollary, mathematics.
These are only two of the many complex and intermingled strands that made up
the Scientific Revolution. We might have talked about those gentlemen and
gentlewomen who kept laboratories, rooms where they would
labor, in their houses, where they would try to find how many simple
substances (elements) made up the seemingly infinite variety of materials that
made up the world, or those who tried to find out what electricity was made of
and where it came from, or wandered around trying to figure out where the
mountains and valleys had come from and why there were different rocks in
different places, or those who would spend quiet evenings with their families,
sitting at a work table and trying to build a better clock than the world had
ever seen before, or...
But there are far too many people and subjects to consider in a survey course
such as this. It should be enough to say that the flood of new things that came
into Europe in the Age of Discovery and Exploration overwhelmed the concept of
orderly and stable universals that made rational thought and discourse possible.
For the next four hundred years, Europeans attempted to restore that sense of
order, and they brought to the task some hitherto unsuspected aspects of their
character: their passion for collecting and organizing, their willingness to
take infinite pains to measure things exactly and count them accurately, and a
general sense of curiosity that made The Scientific Revolution something of a
mass movement.
The result of all of this activity was that, step by step, they created a new
set of categories, much more numerous and varied than the old, to support civil
discourse and rational inquiry. As discovery followed discovery, the possibility
began to dawn on people that perhaps the Universe was like a gigantic watch,
operating in accordance with logical natural laws that it was possible to know,
if not to change. God had set the Universe in motion and was now letting it run
by itself. God was not personally directing what happened. The Universe was
merely running in accordance with the laws he had set for it at the beginning of
time. It was upon this possibility that The Age of Enlightenment
arose.
ASSIGNMENTS
REQUIRED ASSIGNMENTS
There are a large number of sites devoted to science and the history of
science, and it is not often easy to tell them apart. The sites assigned for
this section have relatively specific subjects, but those subjects will, I hope,
give you an idea of The Scientific Revolution as a long and broad movement,
composed of many different people, each following their curiosity. A Dutch site,
The Measurers,
considers one painting of the time and, from that, considers how the interest in
accurate measurement was current throughout society. The development of the
theory of evolution created a change in our view of the world and our place in
it that is still unsettling to many. The Evolution
Entrance will open the way for you to consider this idea in a broad social
context. Finally, lest I overemphasize the masses at the expense of outstanding
individuals, Newtonia: pages about Sir
Isaac Newton will focus your attention on one of the most important figures
of the modern era.
RECOMMENDED ASSIGNMENTS
The Museum of the History of Science
of Oxford University is one of the richest sites for such studies, and you would
find your time well spent if you were to take the time to stroll through its
holdings.
This text was produced by >Lynn H. Nelson, Department of
History, University of Kansas.
9 March 1998
Lawrence
KS
