Scientific RevolutionGalileo, Descartes, Newton, and

Bacon

• How does this painting by Rembrandt from Protestant Holland reflect the changes taking place in Europe from a scientific perspective?

Causes?

• Reformation loosening restrictions on scientific inquiry.

• The spread of expansion and discovery.

• Growing skepticism towards organized religion in part due to the wars of religion.

The Copernican Universe

Galileo

• Attempted to prove the Copernican Hypothesis.

• Designed and built his own telescopes.

• Identified the craters of the moon, the phases of Venus and other phenomena that proved the universe is in a state of change.

The Father of Physics

• His works ran afoul of the religious fervor of the counter-reformation and were equally unpopular to Protestants.

Empricism

• Galileo called before the inquisition and his teachings condemned, he was put on trial in 1633 and sentenced to house arrest for the last 9 years of his life where he continued to consolidate his scientific views through EMPRICISM.

Rene Descartes

• Refused to believe anything he couldn’t prove. Doubt all he previously he held true including the evidence of his own senses.

• Gave rise to his motto: I think, therefore I am.

Father of “Math and Philosophy!”

• Reconstructed the world baed on “material objects”. What ever is clearly and distinctly perceived must exist.

• Sun example• Believed, unlike

Hobbes in a “perfect being” not necessarily associated with “God”.

Newton

• Does there exist a simple rule by which the motion of the heavenly bodies of our planetary system can be completely calculated, if the state of motion of all these bodies at a single moment is known?

Newton’s Legacy

Calculus• When Newton began to muse on the problem of

the motion of the planets and what kept them in their orbits around the sun, he realized that the mathematics of the day weren't sufficient to the task. Properties such as direction and speed, by their very nature, were in a continuous state of flux, constantly changing with time and exhibiting varying rates of change. So he invented a new branch of mathematics, which he called the fluxions (later known as calculus). Calculus allowed him to draw tangents to curves, determine the lengths of curves, and solve other problems that classical geometry could not help him solve.

Telescope

• His original reflecting telescope, which he built himself in 1668, was just six inches long. This modest device not only eliminated the colored fringes but magnified whatever it focused on by 40 times, which, as Newton noted at the time, "is more than any 6 foote Tube can do."

Planetary Motion• Law of inertia: Every

object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

Law of acceleration: Force is equal to the change in momentum (mV) per change in time. For a constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration, F = ma.

Law of action and reaction: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Apples and Physics• Newton said shortly

before his death that it was seeing an apple fall in his mother's garden that set him thinking "that the power of gravity ... was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon ... and if so that must influence her motion and perhaps retain her in her orbit."

Alchemistry• Newton spent untold

hours of his life practicing alchemy. Like other alchemists, he sought to turn base metals into gold, find a universal cure for disease, and secure the elixir of life, which promised perpetual youth and eternal life. In his garden shed outside his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the midst of phials and furnaces, mortars and pestles,

Light and Color

• Not long after he donated his telescope to the Royal Society, Newton delivered a paper to that august body about his novel theory of light and colors. Using prisms and his usual very exacting experimental technique, Newton had discovered that sunlight is comprised of all the colors of the rainbow, which could not only be separated but recombined into white light.

Father of Sciences

• "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

• Many scientists today would argue that the greatest Giant of all in the world of science was Isaac Newton himself.

• “Newton” by William Blake

Francis Bacon

• Inductive method of exploration• “Think all things possible until they can

be tested”• Empirical faculty of all things led him to

the Baconian or Scientific Method.• Drawing conclusions from observation…

start from the specific and use it to establish a truth.

• Contrary to the age old practice of devising a theory and looking for evidence to support it.

Other scientific achievements

Robert Boyle

• The natural world consists of atomic particles of all shapes and sizes.

• Boyle’s law the behavior of gases

Medical Advances

Anatomical advances

• Andreas Vesalius and anatomical drawings

• William Harvey and the study of the anatomy of the heart

• Robert Hooke: microbiology and germ theory