Hilda Gleason
Azusa Pacific Online University
August 22nd, 2014
The scientific revolution began in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance era and continued through the late eighteenth century. It was the rise of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry altered views of society and nature. It influenced the intellectual and social movement known as the Enlightenment. It customarily started with the Copernican Revolution (initiated in 1543) and to be complete in the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia. The change of attitude came from Bacon whose confident and insistent proclamation of a New Era in the advancement of science inspired the creation of the Royal Society. Galileo supported Copernicus and developed the science of motion. In the twentieth century, Alexandre Koyré introduced the term scientific revolution, centering his study on Galileo, and the term became widely popular in his Origins of Modern Science by Butterfield. The Scientific Revolution was known all over Europe as an international phenomenon; scholars from all over took part in it. The most-important leading figures were Nicolaus Copernicus (Father of Modern Astronomy), Tycho Braye, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton. Some of the important discoveries of this time period and their effects were; Copernicus discovered that earth and all the planets revolve around the sun. Before Copernicus discovery astronomers believed, the earth was the center of the universe, and the sun and planets revolved around it. Tycho Braye discovered new stars that are known as supernovae in 1573. He was well-known throughout his life as an alchemist and astronomer. Kepler contributed the three laws of planetary motion, which helped Isaac Newton later on. These laws were; The planets move around the sun, not in circles, but curve 2. Planets do not move consistently, but in such a way that a line drawn from a planet to the sun spans out an equal area of the curve of its orbit in equal time, even if the curve is not perfectly centered on the sun 3. The squares of the periods of the planets' orbits are equivalent to the cubes of their distances from the sun. Galilei telescopic observations led to the start of the great revolution in an attempt to understand the nature of the objects in the sky. He discovered moons of Jupiter and that Saturn has a system of rings. Also, he corrected some misconceptions about gravity and proved that a pendulum's period was a determinant of the length of the pendulum, not the length of the arc of the pendulum's swing leading to pendulum clocks. He also hypothesized and proved that an objects rate of fall when dropped is independent of its weight. It had previously been assumed that the heavier object falls faster than a lighter object by nature. Isaac Newton was central to the Revolution, and his work transformed the fields of motion and optics, on top of other subjects. He not only discovered gravitational force, but he also established the three Universal Laws of Motion. By tying Johannes Kepler's Laws of Planetary motion with these discoveries, he established classic mechanics the beginning of modern Physics. He proved the heliocentric model first proposed by Copernicus conclusively and was the first to propose a set of laws that described the motion of all things in the universe. It served as the basis for our understanding on how the universe functions and why it is the way it is, this was a breakthrough. His discovered the Binomial Theorem and was one of the two creators of calculus. Without all these advances in mathematics, scientists could not design vehicles to carry us and other machines into space, let alone plot the best and safest course. Calculus gave scientist the tools to set up a theoretical model of the situation and still account for changing