Week Four

The Scientific Revolution was significant in the history of the Europe and the rest of the Western World because it challenged what was generally believed to be the truth.  It made an impact on religious beliefs and on what was accepted as the truth among educated people throughout Europe in the early modern era.  Before the Scientific Revolution, the European outlook on the universe was not scientific, but religious, based on beliefs set by the Catholic Church.  It centered in the idea that the sun and the rest of the universe revolved around the earth – an idea that coincided with the Catholic emphasis on God’s plan revolving around the human inhabitants of the Earth.  On this topic, Strayer writes, “The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary because it fundamentally challenged this understanding of the universe” (742).  In 1543, when Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the earth and other planets actually revolved around the sun, he challenged accepted religious and scientific beliefs and set the Scientific Revolution in motion.

Over the next 200 years, Copernicus was followed by other scientific thinkers who broke ground in scientific fields such as anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, and physics.  One of the latest, yet most impactful and remembered to this day was Sir Isaac Newton.  Newton focused his work on the concept of universal gravitation.  This was a radical idea because it unified the heavens and the earth.  Under Newton’s laws, the planets in orbit abided by the same natural laws as did all objects on earth.  In the time leading up to and during the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, questions about the functions of the universe were answered with religious explanations of God and supernatural forces. But by the time Sir Isaac Newton died, the generally accepted truth among educated Europeans was that the universe functioned on its own according to mathematically supported scientific principals rather than God.