“What makes the Scientific Revolution (a) scientific and (b) Revolutionary?”

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Scott Sandoval

AP European History

Period B

December 1, 2001

Homework

“What makes the Scientific Revolution (a) scientific

and (b) Revolutionary?”

        For many scholars, the year 1543 is considered to be the beginning of the scientific revolution. This year marked Copernicus’s publication of, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) and Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body). Spanning for more than a century and a half, man's conception of himself and the universe he inhabited was altered. Not only did the above modifications occur but the scholastic method of reasoning was replace by new, revolutionary scientific methods.

        Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543), was born in Torun, Poland. He received higher educated in Italy for ten years starting from when he was twenty-three years old. While in Italy, among other things he studied the accepted astronomical system of the time, developed by Ptolemy. This system depicted the universe as consisting of the earth and ten spheres: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Firmament (fixed stars), the Crystalline Heaven which imparted motion to the spheres around the earth, and finally the motionless Empyrean Heaven where God dwelt with the elect. These spheres were generally believed to be solid and transparent, and the planets to be of a non-earthly weightless substance fitted into the spheres and revolving with them around the motionless earth. Beyond the Empyrean Heaven there was nothing. Thus, the universe was considered to be a finite entity with the stationary earth as its center.

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The contradiction to Ptolemy’s system was as the astronomers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries collected more data the Ptolemaic System was noted to have more and more errors. Copernicus revolutionized the idea of the appearance of the universe. He stated that the Sun was the universe rather than the earth, and that the planets revolved around the sun not the earth. This system is known as the Heliocentric Universe.

Although Copernicus stated the main points about our universe, without the minor adjustments made by other scientist, Copernicus’s theory would have probably been rejected. Tyco Brahe (1546-1601) was a Danish ...

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