The Scientific Revolution

Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most widely influential was an epistemological transformation known as the "Scientific Revolution." The scientific revolution was 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.

Galileo combined the two roles of observer and theorist and provided the empirical discoveries that cinched the Copernican-Keplerian universe. In 1609 he bought a new Dutch invention, the telescope. While the telescope had been around for a few years, he was the first to use it to systematically look at the heavens. In 1610 he discovered the four moons of Jupiter. It was his book, A Dialogue Between the Two Chief Systems of the World that inspired the Roman Catholic Church to closely examine his observations and models and compare them to church doctrine and the texts of the Old and New Testament. The Church concluded that his ideas were at variance with both doctrine and Scriptures and demanded, on pain of death, that he recant his views. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest and insisted that there was nothing in new science that was anti-Christian.

The man who has come to symbolize the scientific revolution was Sir Isaac Newton. He combined experimentation with mathematics, and combined the works of several predecessors to establish a comprehensive explanation of the physical laws that govern gravitation and astronomy. He discovered that different elements, when subject to heat give off a characteristic color in the light spectrum. The spectrum of light coming from each star was useful in revealing the chemical composition of that star and determining