User:Dandrake/sandbox/revolution

An empirical approach

There is much scholarly debate as to the nature and even the existence of the scientific revolution. To some extent this arises from different conceptions of what the revolution was; some of the rancor and cross-purposes in such debates may arise from lack of recognition of these fundamental differences.

To most scientists who give the matter any thought, and to many other observers, it seems entirely clear that a scientific revolution took place around the year 1600. That is, at that time there were very large and historically sudden changes in science, not only in its content but in its practice and theory. Science, as it is treated in this account, is science essentially as it is understood and practiced in the modern world; there is no concern here with "other narratives" or alternate ways of knowing, or the like.

A striking case for this point of view is presented by the historian of science Howard Margolis as part of a larger (and controversial) theory of the causes of the revolution (Margolis, 2002). It may be summarized in the following lists of significant advances in science:

2nd century

• Galen's work in anatomy
• Ptolemy's calculations of planetary motion. (This and Galen's anatomy, though largely superceded by later work, are none the less important contributions to science.)

Fourteen centuries are omitted here.

About 1600

• Uniform acceleration of falling bodies
• Inertia and inertial frames of reference
• The Earth as a magnet
• Theory of lenses
• Kepler's laws of planetary motion
• Telescopic discoveries: moons of Jupiter, lunar mountains, phases of Venus, etc.
• Laws of hydrostatics
• Constant period of the pendulum

The second list covers well under 100 years.

The challenge is to find work of comparable importance, apart from that of Copernicus, to fill out the intervening period. Margolis reports that the most commonly suggested candidate for filling the gap is Alhazen's theory of intromission; that is, that vision is by means of light emitted from bodies, not rays from the eye. Giving this important work its full value (regardless of its antecedents in Aristotle), much more is needed to fill fourteen centuries, and the candidates are few:

[One may reasonably judge that] Gilbert and Stevin each discovered more that has proved important for modern science than the combination of everyone who lived during the fourteen centuries between them and Ptolemy. But for Kepler and Galileo a claim this bold is not merely arguable, but beyond real dispute. If you measure what either Kepler or Galileo discovered against everything discovered in the previous 1400 years, it is no contest. (Margolis, 2002; p. 139)

The revolution seen in this way may, in view of the importance of science in our world, be considered worthy of the attention of many scholars: of historians, to document as far as possible what demonstrably took place—a large and difficult task, still unfinished; of philosophers, to understand what changes in thinking took place, and their antecedents and their consequences; of sociologists and other social scientists, to find what changes in society and politics underlay this change. Some historians and philosophers of science take this view; others work woith other concepts of the scientific revolution.

[To References]

• Margolis, Howard (2002). It Started with Copernicus. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-138507-X