SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

In the first half of the twentieth century it became a commonplace notion that modern science originated in a seventeenth-century "revolution" in thought precipitated by a new methodology for studying nature. In the last third of the twentieth century, a consensus developed among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science that the emergence of modern science was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Furthermore, while modern science for 300 years claimed that its methodology generated value-free, objective knowledge, the late-twentieth-century consensus was that, implicitly and explicitly, the practice of science incorporated moral, ethical, and social value judgments.

The Seventeenth-Century Achievement

A fundamentally new approach to the study of nature did indeed emerge in seventeenth-century western Europe. The first herald of this development was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who argued for a renovation in the human conception of knowledge and of knowledge of nature in particular. Especially in his Novum Organum (1620; New instrument [for reasoning]), Bacon formulated a radically empirical, inductive, and experimental-operational methodology for discovering laws of nature that could be put to use to give humankind power over nature. Bacon was primarily a social reformer who believed that knowledge could become an engine of national prosperity and power, improving the quality of life for all. To that end, he championed widespread education for all classes of society, featuring a strong mechanical-technical component that would assure widespread ability to create and maintain technological innovations. (The island of Laputa episode in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) mocks the Baconian faith in science-based innovation as improving the quality of life.)

Bacon was strongly opposed to mathematical accounts of natural phenomena, seeing in them a continuation of Renaissance magical nature philosophy and an erroneous commitment to deductive reasoning. René Descartes (1596–1650) by contrast, especially in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (written 1628, but not published until 1701) and Discourse on Method (1637), roughly contemporary with Bacon's Novum Organum, articulated a mathematical and rigorously deductive, hence rational methodology for gaining knowledge of nature that employed experiment only to a limited degree and cautiously, because experimental results are ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations. Descartes's own theory of nature was mechanistic, materialistic, and mathematical, hence deductive and deterministic. It became the basis for the mechanical worldwiew that was incorporated into enlightenment thinking and epitomized the view of nature as a clockwork world. Unlike Bacon, Descartes was a practicing researcher and a mathematician. He introduced analytical geometry—enabling algebraic solution of geometric problems—developed a materialistic cosmology in which the solar system and Earth formed naturally, discovered the reflex arc in his anatomical researches, developed a mechanical theory of life and biological processes, and wrote influentially on mechanics and optics, formulating his own theory of light.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), in his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), presented a deductive mathematical-experimental methodology that he attributed to Archimedes (c. 287–212 b.c.e.), several of whose treatises were translated into Latin and circulated widely beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century. In this work Galileo founded engineering mechanics and the mathematical theory of strength of materials, and he also extended and corrected earlier contributions to the science of mechanics (while perpetuating the mistaken notion that circular motion was "natural" and hence force-free). This work supplemented his more famous discoveries in astronomy based on his pioneering application of the telescope to the study of the moon and planets, and his defense of Copernicanism, the Sun-centered cosmological theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543).

The Newtonian Triumph

Galileo's methodology probably comes closest to what people mean when they refer to "the scientific method" and its invention in the seventeenth century. It reached its mature form in the hands of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in the last third of the century. In all of his work, but especially in his majestic Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), considered the single most influential scientific text ever, and in Optics (1704), Newton synthesized induction and deduction, mathematics, and experimentation into a powerful methodology capable of revealing, in his view, the hidden "true causes" responsible for the phenomena of empirical experience. Like Descartes, whose methodology (and theories) he dismissed contemptuously, Newton made major contributions to mathematics, inventing, independently of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the calculus; to optics, inventing the reflecting telescope, discovering the phenomenon of diffraction and the seven-color composition of sunlight, and formulating a corpuscular, or particle, theory of light that would be dominant until the wave theory of light gained ascendance in the nineteenth century; to mechanics, in his famous three laws of motion; and to a theory of the universe based on his universal theory of gravitation, which provided a full account of the planetary orbits, confirming the validity of the earlier, scattered insights of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630).

Contrary to Descartes, who believed that matter was infinitely divisible, Newton favored an atomic theory of matter, and based physics and chemistry on a variety of forces acting nonmechanically and/or at a distance, rather than basing it only on mechanical contact forces. Newton's scientific style and his accomplishments represent the peak achievement of the seventeenth-century Scientific "Revolution." Until the mid-eighteenth century, many Continental natural philosophers—the term scientist was invented only in the 1830s—remained committed to Descartes's strictly mechanical model of scientific explanation while rejecting Descartes's particular theories. After that, Newtonianism effectively defined "modern" scientific study of nature until the early twentieth century and the rise of relativity and quantum theory.

By the end of the seventeenth century, then, modern science was firmly established, not only in mathematical physics and astronomy, but as a comprehensive philosophy of nature that was deterministic and materialistic, though explanations incorporated immaterial forces—such as gravity, electrical and magnetic attraction/repulsion, and selective chemical affinity—that acted according to strictly mathematical laws. This materialistic-deterministic approach to nature was broadly applied to biological and medical phenomena, especially in Italy and at the University of Padua, as reflected in William Harvey's (1578–1657) demonstration in 1628 of the closed circulation of the blood pumped by the heart and by the Galileo-influenced work of Giovanni Borelli (1608–1679) and others on the mechanics of the human skeletal and skeletal-muscular systems.

Even more than the telescope, the mid-seventeenth-century invention of the microscope by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) revealed the existence of new worlds. The demonstration by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) of the mechanical pressure exerted by the atmosphere using a simple barometer, which also showed that a vacuum could be created, strongly reinforced the mechanical conception of nature. A critical contribution to the new philosophy of nature was Christiaan Huygens's (1629–1695) midcentury demonstration that circular motion required a force to maintain it, contrary to the previous 2,000 years of Western thought. Descartes and Galileo both misunderstood this fact, which became a cornerstone of modern mechanics in Newton's principle of inertia. By the rise of the enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century, an amalgam of Descartes's mechanical worldview Cartesian mechanism and Newtonian deterministic mathematical physics was applied to society and its institutions, for example, by the Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) in France, and even to the human mind, for example, by David Hume (1711–1776) and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780).

Newtonianism Dethroned

In the nineteenth century, Newtonianism was severely challenged, and in the twentieth century it was displaced. The relationship between increasingly abstract mathematical models of nature and "reality" became an issue. The models worked empirically, but did they also provide a picture of reality? Meanwhile, the wave theory of light overthrew Newton's corpuscular theory and when incorporated by James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) into an electromagnetic field theory of energy led to attributing causal efficacy to space-filling immaterial entities. The introduction of the concept of energy on a par with matter diluted the deterministic materialism of modern science, while the new science of thermodynamics revealed that Newton's conception of time was flawed. Finally, with the kinetic theory of gases, statistical explanations were introduced into physics, which called determinism into question. With relativity and quantum theory, from 1905 on, Newtonian conceptions of space, time, matter, force, cause, and explanation, and Descartes's deductive model of rationality would all be replaced, and a fundamentally new form of science and a new, statistical conception of reality would emerge.

Seventeenth-century nature philosophy had presented itself as a body of impersonal knowledge, as simply descriptive of the way things were "out there," independent of personal, social, and cultural values. Given the religious wars of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the explicitly values-steeped character of Renaissance nature philosophy, this was a major epistemological innovation. The value-free character of the knowledge was guaranteed, it was thought, by a methodology employed in acquiring it that eliminated the influence of the subject on knowledge. However attractive such a conception of knowledge was then and continued to be through the nineteenth century, it created a gulf between facts and values, between knowledge and its applications, that in principle could not be bridged by reason, which increasingly came to be defined as reasoning in the scientific (hence objective) manner.

Bacon tacitly assumed that people would know what to do with the new mastery of nature that scientific knowledge would give them. But already by the mid-seventeenth century, the educational reformer John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) was warning that the new science was as likely to create a hell on Earth as a manmade heaven if application-relevant values were not explicitly linked to knowledge. In fact, right through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, modernism, first in the West and then globally, has borne witness to the accuracy of Comenius's warning. While the scope and explanatory/predictive power of science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries increased dramatically and became the basis of life-transforming technological innovations, there was no commensurate increase in conceptual "tools" for identifying which innovations to implement or how to implement them. Elimination of any influence on knowledge of the values held by the subject of knowledge eliminated any influence of knowledge on the values held by subjects!

As a result, even as science and technology became, after 1800, the primary agents of social change around the world, scientists and engineers remained outsiders to the terms of that change, which was driven overwhelmingly by scientifically nonrational political and market values. Both government funding of scientific research, especially in the United States after World War II, and industry dependence on science for technological innovations blurred the distinction between pure and applied science, reinforcing the post-1960s critique of science as in fact a value-laden ideology and not objective knowledge.

STEVEN L. GOLDMAN

SEE ALSO Enlightenment Social Theory;Industrial Revolution;Moderniation;Secularization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hankins, Thomas L. (1985). Science and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Outlines the spread of Newtonianism in the eighteenth century.

Harman, P. M. (1982). Energy, Force, and Matter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Traces the growing conceptual complexity of nineteenth-century science.

Nye, Mary Jo. (1996). Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800–1940. New York: Twayne. Excellent account of physics and chemistry at the dawn of their connection to government.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. (1985). Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Classic study of the sociocultural context of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution.

Webster, Charles. (2002). The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660, 2nd edition. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang. Detailed account of the social context of Bacon's ideas and their influence on modern science.

Westfall, Richard S. (1971). The Construction of Modern Science. New York: Wiley. Excellent short history of seventeenth-century science.

Westfall, Richard S. (1993). The Life of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Revised version of classic biography.