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'The Scientific Revolution may have increased knowledge, but it made little practical difference to people's lives.' Is this a fair comment?
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To this question one can answer either 'yes' or 'no' and be correct with both conclusions as I will explain in this essay. It is all a matter of time. To the peasant, the servant and even the aristocracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, not only did the scientific revolution have little or no practical effect on their lives, most of them never even knew what it was or that it was happening. However, today in the twenty-first century not only are we aware that the scientific revolution took place at that time it is also obvious that our daily lives would be completely different had the scientific revolution not taken place. In view of the above we need to look at both eras to assess both answers and also to establish exactly what was the scientific revolution. The shift in the western mind from the medieval to the modern world was underpinned by the growth of science. Around the sixteenth, seventeenth and the eighteenth century, changes in the fields of Biology (looking at physiology and anatomy) and astronomy, which was mainly concerned with the issue of the solar system, began to occur. To begin with, these different factors became more and more established independently but then in the early eighteenth century they began to merge as one to create the Scientific Revolution, as these findings were spread to society. Some historians feel that the Scientific Revolution can be mainly described as the changing of man’s view of what the Universe is and how it works. The Scientific Revolution occurred largely due to ‘imaginative’ philosophers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. Before such philosophers as these the generally accepted astronomical system was that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe and that spheres holding ‘fixed stars’ (i.e. the moon, Jupiter and Venus) would revolve around the stationary Earth. In the mid- sixteenth century Copernicus began to look deeper into these theories and soon discovered more and more problems. He examined the theories of an astronomer called Aristarchus who had put forward the idea that the Sun was in fact the centre of the Universe and that the Earth and other ‘fixed stars’ revolved around the Sun. He also thought that the Earth itself revolved on its own axis at a daily rate. Copernicus was the first to back up these theories and state that the Universe was in fact a heliocentric cosmology. He then published two books; ‘The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies’ and ‘Vesalius’. This may be taken as the beginning of the Scientific Revolution or be it the astronomical part of the Scientific Revolution. Copernicus’ system was only observed by a few people at the time and most, if not all, would have been theologians. However, the few that actually took note of Copernicus views were inclined to reject it. This is because people of the time had grown up with Aristotle’s theories about the Universe for hundreds of years and Ptolemy’s astronomical system had also been generally accepted, so Copernicus’ heliocentric cosmology went against their ‘entire science of astronomy’. Copernicus was not overly outspoken though and so therefore not too much disruption was caused within the society of the time as not many people were aware of it and those that were just simply rejected it. This shows that, as the Scientific Revolution was beginning, it was not having much practical influence on peoples lives simply because people were not aware of it. The same is true for the people that were aware of it as they had rejected it as it did not coincide with what they already believed and so therefore was not showing much effect, except maybe confusion, on their lives either. It was also said that the significance of the Copernicus findings was not so much the system that he suggested but more the fact that the system would ignite the great revolution in physics.
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