01:360:401 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Nicolaus Copernicus, Scientific Method, World View

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Chapter 18: Toward a New World-
view
The Scientific Revolution
1. Introduction
1. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was the major cause
of the change in world-view and one of the key developments in the
evolution of Western society
2. Modern science precise knowledge of the physical world based on the
union of experimental observations with sophisticated mathematics
2. Scientific Thought in 1500
1. European ideas about the universe were based on Aristotelian-medieval
ideas
1. Ten crystal spheres moved around a motionless earth fixed at the
center of the universe and beyond the spheres was heaven
2. Earth was made up of four imperfect, changeable elements: air, fire,
water, earth
3. A uniform force moved an object at a constant speed and the object
would stop as soon as that force was moved
2. Aristotle’s ideas about astronomy and physics were accepted with minor
revisions for two thousand years
1. Offered an understandable, commonsense explanation for what the
eye saw
2. Suited Christianity because it positioned human beings at the center
of the universe and established a home for God (science in this period
was primarily a branch of theology)
3. The Copernican Hypothesis
1. The desire to explain and thereby glorify God’s handiwork led to the first
great departure from the medieval system by Nicolaus Copernicus
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2. Copernicus, a Polish clergyman and astronomer, believed that that the
sun was the center of the universe and that all the stars and planets,
including Earth, revolved around the sun (Copernican hypothesis)
1. Was cautious with this idea and did not publish his On the Revolutions
of the Heavenly Spheresuntil the year of his death (1543)
3. This heliocentric theory had enormous scientific and religious implications
1. Destroyed the main reason for believing in crystal spheres capable of
moving the stars around the earth: stars’ movement is simply a result
of the earth’s rotation
2. Suggested a universe of staggering size: the earth moved around the
sun and yet the stars appeared to remain in the same place
3. Destroyed the basic idea of Aristotelian physicsthe earthly world is
quite different from the heavenly oneby characterizing Earth as just
another planet: where is Heaven?
4. The Copernican hypothesis created doubts about traditional Christianity
and brought sharp attacks from both Protestant and Catholic religious
leaders
4. From Brahe to Galileo
1. Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer that agreed with the Copernican
hypothesis
1. Established himself as Europe’s leading astronomer with his detailed
observations of a new star that appeared in 1572
2. Built the most sophisticated observatory of his time with generous
grants from the king of Denmark
3. Greatest contribution was his mass of data
4. Believed that all the planets revolved around the sun and that the
entire group of sun and planets revolved in turn around the earth-
moon system (part Ptolemaic, part Copernican)
2. Brahe’s assistant, Johannes Kepler, formulated three laws of planetary
motion that mathematically proved the precise relations of a sun-centered
(solar) system
1. Orbits of the planets around the sun are elliptical rather than circular
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2. The planets do not move at a uniform speed in their orbits
3. The time a planet takes to make its complete orbit is precisely related
to its distance from the sun (came close to formulating the idea of
universal gravitation)
3. Galileo Galilei was a Florentine that challenged all the old ideas about
motion
1. Greatest achievement was the elaboration and consolidation of
the experimental method(conducted controlled experiments to find out
what actually did happen instead of speculating)
2. Formulated the law of inertia: an object continues in motion forever
unless stopped by some external force (rest is not the natural state of
objects)
3. Tried for heresy by the papal Inquisition in 1632 and forced to recant
his views after openly criticizing the traditional views of Aristotle and
Ptolemy in his Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World
4. The traditional religious and theological world-view, which rested on
determining and accepting the proper established authority, was
beginning to give way in certain fields to a critical, modern scientific
method (greatest accomplishment of the entire scientific revolution)
5. Newton’s Synthesis
1. In his famous book, Principia (1687), Newton integrated the astronomy of
Copernicus and Kepler with the physics of Galileo
1. Found a single explanatory system that comprehended motion both
on earth and in the skies
2. United the experimental and theoretical-mathematical sides of modern
science
3. The key feature in his synthesis was the law of universal gravitation:
every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe in
a precise mathematical relationship, whereby the force of attraction is
proportional to the quantity of matter of the objects and inversely
proportional to the square of the distance between them
6. Causes of the Scientific Revolution
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