Talk:Scientific Revolution

Note to the editors: You can time-stamp your posts anonymously with 5 tildes, thus 10:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC).

This is advocacy, not an encyclopedia article. Does anybody feel confident they know about the topic to be able to fix it, or should I get out the chainsaw? --Robert Merkel

This is pretty bad. The Scientific Revolution is a oft-used term by historians of science, and not nonsense as the writer of this atricle wishes us to believe. Ought to be completely rewritten. --Victor Gijsbers

Done. Still a lot of room for improvement, though. --Victor Gijsbers

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Reason for revert: for example:

Rather, Aristotelian philosophy dependend upon the assumption that man's mind could elucidate all the laws of the universe through reason alone.

From aristotle:

Whereas Plato was an idealist and a rationalist who believed that what we see is an imperfect copy of the intelligible Forms, Aristotle thought that what we know of the world must begin with the senses (see materialism and empiricism). Thus, Aristotle set the stage for what would eventually develop into the scientific method centuries later.

This confuses me... :) Martin

We need to revert the revert! The article we have on Aristotle is misleading, if not totally wrong. Aristotle did not in any way practice what we moderns call science! He wrote about subjects that were later investigated with the scientific method. However, as a matter if principle Aristotle and all later Aristotleians refused to compare their ideas with reality; they did not perform experiments. I think the article we have non Aristotle was written by a non-scientists. RK

As for the position that science is a religion, that is only a recent ad homenin attack by religious fundamentalists who are fearful of science. It is also used by people who, quitre literally, have no idea what the word means. Science is the opposite of religion; science is a method, and not a position. There are no beliefs about the physical world in science that one must hold to; rather, all one's ideas about the world are provisional truths, and one must be willing to change these beliefs if facts surface that justify such changes. In contrast, most religions do not allow for one to abandon one's core religious beliefs ever. Belief is essential to most faiths. This striking distinction muct be preserved in the article. RK

RK, Aristotelians did not refuse to compare their ideas with reality. They did not do experiments, true, but this was a logical consequence of their idea of natural and imposed behaviour: in an experiment, you will see imposed behaviour, not natural behaviour. Thus experiments do not help you to understand nature. The change from this view to the experimental tradition was one of the major developments of the scientific revolution, as I described. However, although Aristotle did not practice modern science, he surely practiced something we ought to call science. He based his science on observation; did you know Aristotle was the first great biologist? While living on the island Lesbos, he dissected lots of animals and wrote biological treatises based on what he observed. Victor Gijsbers

Ok, I agree with your analysis. I just think that this definition (terminology) is an important point. RK

Is the distinction between science and religion really essential to this article? I thought it was a rather tangential point, myself - better suited to science and religion or some similar article. Martin

Nope, I'd say that has to go. It has nothing to do with the subject. Victor Gijsbers

Here I disagree. This is a great example of a scientific revolution: the change from observation to experimentation is a revolution. RK

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I applaud RK's counter-revisionist efforts in the matter of literary criticism, though I'm not sure "socialist" (cf his change summary) is quite the right epithet. The word has been pretty much superceded by PoMo, I'd say.

But substantively, there's still an odd problem, and I'm not sure how to NPOV it. Or a couple of problems. In the four-step program, Galileo is described as 'presenting the observational process in a form which appears to have the rigour of the 'unimpeachable' Euclidean proof, in his "falling bodies experiments."' I don't know how to improve this, because I don't really see what it means. An old-fashioned way of describing Galileo's work would be that he did experiments and developed mathematical theory to account for them. Is the statement I've quoted any more than an attempt to make him sound bad, as if he claimed mathematical certainty for experimental data? Dandrake 07:29, Jan 5, 2004 (UTC)

I think you have hit it right on the head. The wording used by these particular literary critics is intended to obfuscate the point, and belittle the scientists involved. A straight-forward explanation in plain English would work against their purposes! RK

Then, 'Third, Robert Boyle sets about transforming Galileo's 'idealised' thought experiment as characterised by Galileo's "falling bodies experiments".' [Pretty soon I'll correct the text's odd inconsistencies in quote-mark usage.] This I understand: it's the old claim that Galileo's reported experiments were actually just thought experiments: he couldn't have really performed them, you know, because it was not possible to measure time that accurately. In fact, the claim is simply wrong. Galileo's experimental work was replicated forty (40) years ago, yielding rather surprising accuracy. Not to mention that his experimental notebooks are known in detail.

(Which is less surprising? That writers keep quoting each other without catching up with data from the 1960s? Or that the scholarly historians never actually tried the experiments (apparently) before deciding that they were impossible? But I digress.)

Anyway, the factual error tends to make the whole argument of this section require restructuring. Since I think the argument is all wrong, I must invite others to try that project. Dandrake 07:29, Jan 5, 2004 (UTC)

Good points. I would support your editing of this article. RK 01:44, Jan 6, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I meant what I said about inviting the Cultural Materialists to join the discussion and see if they vould re-work the text; but they don't seem to have this piece watch-listed. And my patiecne with wrong information is limited. I don't really like the kind of hack I inserted; a good article does not so obviously fight with itself. But getting some of the information from the past forty years (Yes, I am deliberately tweaking the noses of the hyper-post-modern critics) into the article was the only alternative to deleting that section completely. A better way of integrating these things into the article is invited from anyone who can do it; but please don't ignore the existing research.

While I'm up, I see that the very few quote-marks previously in the article were double, which is the best usage anyway; so I'll make changes for consistency. If there's a style sheet for scare-quotes, I haven't seen it. Dandrake 00:13, Jan 9, 2004 (UTC)

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About the Galileo thought experiment issue:

Recent discussions regarding Galileo do not concern themselves with the question of whether or not Galileo did or did not actually conduct his experiments.

The key transition from Galileo to Boyle is presentational, in that the experimental process is deliberately, systematically and (theoretically) incontrovertably interwoven with the witnessing, record keeping, publishing, review and debating process, so that 'accusations' of 'imaginary experiments' or falsified experiments cannot be unjustifiably made (as perhaps they might have been in the case of Galileo) about those observations of nature which are successfully admitted to the body of scientific knowledge.

I don't know of any such challenge actually being made before the 20th century; but I could be wrong, and that doesn't change your point anyway. Given what you say, it seems that the wording about idealised thought experiments could be modified to look more like what you say here and less like "he didn't necessarily do the experiments"; then my counter-paragraph would become pointless, and could be removed. This would be a good thing for the article IMO.

Galileo 'broke the mould' by successfully gaining acceptance of the experiment as a process which could successfully challenge received authority, Aristotle, the church, the bible and deductive reasoning as a uniquely satisfactory source of revelation concerning the natural world.

Without Galileo, there is no reason to believe Boyle would have been inspired to originate or indeed refine (into a form which is now the norm) this seemingly definitive structure of the observational knowledge acquisition process.

Boyle was essentially making it such that the suspicions concerning Galileo's having concocted a fictional experiment would no longer need to be endured, providing 'Boylean rigour' was sustained in the overall knowledge body building regime (in other words, document the 'boring' details of your experiments, rather than rely upon Euclidean proofs as a means of validating your conclusions regarding their results).

Nonetheless, put in its historical context, the Euclidean proofs were (ironically) what helped others recognise the revolutionary nature of Galileo's work, even though the Euclidean proof was in a way the opposite of what made it revolutionary.

Ericross

These are good points, as far as I'm concerned. I respectfully suggest working them more fully into the text of the four-part summary. As it stands, what is supposed to a presentation of the conventional wisdom has a "this is wrong" tone, and also does not accurately present that side; I really think a criticism of that position would be stronger if the presentation didn;t start out by getting people's backs up. Dandrake 20:48, Jan 10, 2004 (UTC)

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To Dandrake

I did not intend to give the impression that Boyle was seeking to 'address the shortcomings of Galileo's prescription of experimentalism' in the sense of this being some kind of 'criticism' of Galileo, although admittedly, if Boyle is exhorting, as he is, experimentalists to 'document their experiments' in a way more compatible with the 'forensic' preparation of evidence for a trial, there is obviously an implied criticism of a more casually presented testimony, lacking in sufficient detail to persuade those not expecting to have to replicate the experiment in order to confirm the results.

I know of no evidence to support the claim that Boyle sought to show anything but respect to Galileo, in his attempt to progress further in Galileo's direction.

Boyle was NOT saying:

"Look at Galileo, see how sloppy he was in leaving out sufficient detail so as to make his descriptions of his experiments seem to be speculative fantasies?".

Boyle was saying (in my words):

"If we want to realise the dreams of Bacon and Galileo, we need to take Bacon's injunction to 'put nature to the question' and Galileo's example of how to do this successfully, and use the rigours of a process which has the well established disciplines of jurisprudence (systematically tested evidence and published judgements) to produce a body of precedents and statutes which will constitute the human account of the laws of nature, an enterprise which will honour the memories of these two great figures and hopefully serve humanity better than the prevailing ignorance and mysticism which this future body of knowledge is intended to supplant."

Galileo convinced sceptics that 'practical human investigative action' could overcome the inaccurate descriptions that the natural shortcomings of our mechanically unaided senses and minds have lead us to accept and which the inevitable emergence of established dogma has discouraged us from challenging.

Bacon, independently of Galileo, championed and planned the campaign of challenge, but did not provide a demonstration of a successful challenge in the way that Galileo had, leaving an unfulfilled agenda to inspire his successors.

Boyle saw the validity of Galileo's method of challenge and accepted the Baconian targets of such a challenge, but also recognised that few if any experimental examinations of natural phenomena offered the same opportunity for Euclidean proof-style validation of their results as the 'falling body experiments' and so Boyle sought and identified an alternative method of validation of experimentally obtained knowledge, namely a 'legalistic' trial of that knowledge.

Boyle's recognition of the value of experiments, combined with his solution to the 'validation problem' renders his contribution in science such that it is of equal value when compared with the legacies of Galileo, Bacon and Newton.

Ericross

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I'm trying to edit the literary-criticisms section according to the way I understand the above argument, which is IMO much more reasonable and better presented than the text in the article. If I've misunderstood, we need further discussion. But something has to be done, at least to the four-step program for the SR, the presentation of which is not what anyone believes, but a caricature by its critics, laced with sarcasm and scare quotes. For the moment, please note, I'm not touching the rebuttals of conventional SR ideas; just that which they claim to rebut. "Straw man" is an impolite and abused term, but it's relevant here.

I've now rewritten the First point, and have gladly torn out the paragraph I wrote in answer to it. If anyone wants to revert, don't forget to revert the counter-paragraph as well. Dandrake 06:15, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)

Ditto the third step, and its false imputation of mere thought experiments, and the rebuttal to that. Speaking of "mere", I changed that to "pure" reason in point one, because scientists do not consider reason to be "mere". [You're not going to invoke Mere Christianity on me, surely; not here.<g>] Dandrake 06:29, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)

To Dandrake:

Here's the current state of the paragraph:

"A recent trend in literary theory, "Cultural materialism" denies that there was a scientific revolution, or that if a revolution occured, it denies that it was important. Literary critics who hold this point of view have a unqiue, and many would claim, mistaken, definition of what the term "revolution" means. These literary critics hold that if a scientific revolution did not occur instantaneously, and without historical precedent, then by definition it cannot be a revolution, and can only be an evolution. If the scientific revolution was only an evolution, then it must have little or no importance."

I want to improve upon this.

I appreciate the courtesy of taking it up here; gives one a warm glow of self-righteousness, no?-- to be out of the edit wars that pop up elsewhere. However, this is really addressed to the wrong person: that para was edited by RK. I've dropped a note in his user talk page, in case he hasn't noticed this traffic. Hence I'm not taking up the issue myself, for the moment. With an exception below. Dandrake 02:26, Jan 28, 2004 (UTC)

"denies that there was a scientific revolution"

Would be more representatively phrased as

"questions whether there was a scientific revolution"

and also:

"it denies that it was important"

might be better put as being:

"questions whether it was important".

However, this is still not really getting to the heart of the latest exploratory work in this field, which has moved on, with the advent of the enormous 1985 impact of "Leviathan and the Air Pump" to anthropologists like Bruno Latour ("We have never been modern" 1993).

The questions are now concerning not whether there was a scientific revolution of not but what revolutions are as a sociological phenomenon.

At first sight it seems clear cut, we can say "there was a time when people did x and there was a time before that when nobody did x" and this has few definitional problems if the thing in question is at least to some extent physical, such people riding on trains rather than relying upon horses for transport.

But in the case of science, it is certainly the case that:

(1) pre-scientific explanations were more commonly given and accepted than scientific ones for a period long after the scientific revolution was claimed to have occurred

(2) some of the changes which account for the revolution are methodolgical, others presentational, others theoretical and still others contingent events, all of which add up to a 'spread of chronology' so diffuse that from a historical standpoint there are only arbitrary criteria available for setting the beginning and end of the revolution.

If something like a revolution cannont be set steadfastly in time, then it challenges the simple everyday notion of the meaning of the term.

Modern anthropologists are concerned with the subtle interplay between pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and post revolutionary manifestations of social phenomena, a study which reveals most practical realities to be much more hybridised combinations than any monolithic construct such as "the scientific revolution" will permit.

Even today, the nature of consciousness, as a scientific topic, is as permeated by metaphysics as it was before even Descartes began to speculate upon the problems we have in terms of reducing it to being the subject of a scientifically accessible experiment.

Science was too fuzzy an innovation, too multidemensional a set of changes, too similar and interconnected to its predecessors to have had a clear beginning sufficiently distinguishable to label a revolution unless you start with Archimedes.

Other questions concern whether the thing called "the scientific revolution" was a political construct, a religious artifact (of appeasesment or challenge) or merely a historical confection whose 'landmark dates' are actually of limited relevance to the timeline for the spread of scientific acceptance.

Nobody is claiming that none of the things associated with the scientific revolution were possibly revolutionary, it is just that some are asking whether, when you add it all up, you get something a lot less "time specific" and "thematically holistic" than, say "the transistor revolution" or the transition from the stone age to the bronze age.

Anthropologists rarely find any revolution which totally escapes the 'amorphous hybrids' and 'chronological parallelism' challenges, but the scientific revolution has only recently been seriously brought under scrutiny in this way, so one can anticipate many more surprises.

Oh, and by the way, no anthropologist thinks an evolution is less important or interesting than a revolution, because evolution poses the prospect of Darwinian/Lamarckian phenomena (intermediate stages, adaptive processes, acquired inherited or transmitted characteristics).

Ericross

An interesting presentation, and I don't deny it has a point. However, the reaction of us scientificalists is not just wounded pride at the notion that some people people think this stuff unimportant; there is a serious disagreement of facts, insofar as the question of whether there was a revolution is a metter of fact.

I have thought, and now am thinking seriously, about yet another section that I might add, an empirical one. Whereas Latour et al. explain how much people's thinking didn't change, the new section would tell specifically, from the scientist's point of view, how much the knowledge of the material world did change during an extraordinarily short time. I.e., Hey, something radical happened. Hope to draft it soon. Dandrake 02:26, Jan 28, 2004 (UTC)

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I've re-read this discussion, and maybe it's time to push forward a bit.

First of all, I see nothing wrong with the suggested changes in wording. I think they should just go in.

On the larger issue, there are major and minor disagreements about Revolution. The major one concerns what revolution we're looking at: what I'll call the sociological discussion obscures or distracts from the revolution in science that is a large part of what scientists and such people mean when they say Scientific Revolution. I've started to compose a section on that, but haven't made it come out right. It shows, I think, that that revolution was staggering in size and speed and specificity of time—in the context of science. And it's also completely unmistakable as to its reality.

Is this limited revolution a phenomenon worthy of serious study by other scholars: historians, philosophers, sociologists, et al.? Seems so to me (and to lots of people on the Science side of this divide, when they're not simply exasperated at the unscientificness of all those non-scientists) because the aftereffects of that change are of a lot of importance, practically and (another point to debate) intellectually.

Then, there's the question whether anything revolutionary really happened in people's ways of thinking and behaving, at least outside the lab. There will be disagreement here, too; but at least the point that the change in people's thinking (insofar as it happened) was not condensed enough in time to be revolutionary—extracting myself from that sentence—such a case can certainly be made.

Another problem remains: I don't see that the position you've developed here has much in common with the exposition in the article section that's now called "Literary criticisms". Maybe I haven't reread that section soberly enough. My current feeling (and I emphasize that word) is that the talk page is making more sense than the article page, an unusual situation that should not persist forever.

Anyway, I intend to tune up my Empirical section, and place it before the Literary one. That, as I see it, places the more restricted view first and the broader one after. With luck, it could give some context for the literary-criticism debate. Dandrake 02:54, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

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Dan, I hope you do not feel that I am being too self-indulgent, lazy, or am imposing unfairly, if I license you (as if such a license was called for on an open system!) to act as an 'amanuensis' for the debate we have begun here.

No problem. In principle, that is; but the difference between practice and theory in practice is always greater than it is in theory.

Please feel free to amend the main article to reflect the changes we seem to agree upon and to identify the controversies we have identified.

And I've simply made the simple changes, which remain relevant after a recent edit or two. But in practice, I don't think I can present any fair summary of the things you're saying, though (as I remarked before) they make a good deal more sense to me than the section as it stands. I suppose the ideas will have to simmer a while longer.Dandrake 21:52, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Here is my problem with the scientific revolution in a nutshell:

Something fundamental began to change.

But the change between Galileo and Boyle is just as revolutionary as the change between Boyle and Newton.

Westfall shows that Newton's Principia was a systematic fraud, perpetrated because Newton felt compelled to disguise the impact of Cartesian mathematics on his discoveries, because he was convinced they were heretical.

Newton actually made the 'science' harder to take seriously than the 'proto-science' which preceded it, but this so embarrassed those unable to cope with the Byzantine mathematical gymnastics necessary to apply his knowledge in the form he had delivered it that there is a strong case to be made that the attribution of a scientific revolution to him, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, etc. was actually a politically correct fig leaf at the time, which, in the light of the technological revolution which succeeded it, seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (but it was a prophecy nonetheless, a fact which has only recently come under scrutiny by historians).

Newton's work is both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary and those historians who used him in the earliest references to what we would now call the scientific revolution, were 'honouring his memory' rather than serving science.

Not, of course, that one could put him outside the account of the development of science, nor to diminish his positive contributions, which were in fact no less great than they had seemed before this distorting process was identified.

How many scientific revolutions were there?

Were they all the same thing?

The war between science and mysticism, although crucial to the story of the revolution, does not seem to begin at a point in time where it serves to satisfactorily demarcate the birth of the revolution (astronomy was not exclusively unscientific before the scientific revolution) so when did it start?

I'm not sure those questions actually help, but the point is, something was claimed, proclaimed and accepted, shortly after these people were all dead, to have been a 'scientific revolution'.

What it was, when it began, what distinguished it from what went before, how it changed things, which things it did not change, which claims it made that can still be challenged philosophically and coherently, make it a phenomenon which is ultimately amorphous and more complex than anything else we happen to describe as a revolution.

Scientists should not be so disturbed that it is being challenged, because to challenge it is good science, because the historical analysis available to us today demands, just like the reports of new experimental data on any well established phenomenon, a re-examination of that phenomenon: new questions need to be asked, new answers sought and the body of scientific knowledge, rather than being threatened by 'anti-science' is strengthened, as it always has been, by a public, vigorous, robust, carefully recorded and ventilated debate.

The scientific revolution has enough in common with other revolutions that it seems picky to say that certain characteristics disqualify it, and yet using similar criteria, other seemingly less important revolutions seem to 'retain their credentials', which seems an odd state of affairs.

But equally, the things that purport to constitute the scientific revolution are so fundamental to human knowledge, that if it is necessary to determine that the scientific revolution was in fact a far more complex and unique set of phenomena than these lesser revolutions, then in fact it will ironically be the case that including it in the category of 'revolutions', far from crowning it with the glory that something so fundamental deserves, will be to diminish its relative importance as a consequence of over-simplifying its developmental history, which may transpire to be best served as being considered to be, as a historical phenomenon, in a category of its own, something which perhaps may altogether transcend our very understanding of terms like 'revolution' and 'evolution'.

If the scientific revolution as we now know it, turns out to be nothing more than a romanticised and distorted mish-mash of vaguely and arbitrarily connected changes, there is nothing to preclude this eventually being replaced by a future systematic and much more scientifically, philosophically and historically accurate account of how we got from Aristotle to Galileo, to where we are now.

We might find that we will still call that account, or some period within it, the scientific revolution, but equally, we might not.

Ericross.

Meanwhile, my own idea of a presentation of what scientists are thinking of (as I perceive it) has cooked long enough that I'm going to insert it. It goes just before this section, giving the "literary" school the last word, sort of, which is appropriate for the broader concept of the revolution. Maybe. Dandrake 21:52, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

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"A pragmatic view..." is my attempt to define what scientists and their friends are likely to think of as the scientific revolution behind all the theorizing about the scientific revolution. (I was going to call it an empirical view, till I noticed the heading preceding it; in this context, pragmatic is less misleading even though less accurate.) It is a "Fern Seed and Elephants" view—that being the title of a collection of pieces by C. S. Lewis, in one of which he accuses theologians of searching diligently for a fern spore while overlooking an elephant standing next to them.

In this case there seems to be an unmistakable set of events in history, so vastly important that all its foes and all its friends have made great edifices of theory and explanation, and have worked in such detailed fashion on the origins and the consequences and the structure and the timing and how and when people became Modern and all, that they don't notice the elephants that Galileo and Kepler rode in on. The article attempts to express this position a bit more politely. If it fails, and seems to cast too much doubt on the legitimacy of other approaches, this is not surprising in light of my actual opinions; let's discuss it here. Dandrake 23:15, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

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Deleted the sentence about some experts saying that science didn't really exist till the 19th century. It may be true, but it's not supported in the article or in anything it points to (so far as I can see), and such stuff doesn't belong in an introduction. Dandrake 05:01, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)

Moved the section on the scientists' scientific revolution to the front, on the grounds that it outlines the data for all the theorizing. Dandrake 22:44, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)

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Moved the following paragraph here because it makes a controversial claim:

I have yet to see any historian publish a dispute of the views given.

Also, writers like Principe and Markley ARE historians.

Westfall systematically demonstrates that Newton's Principia was a fraud in terms of brilliantly constructing an edifice whereby his laws of motion are derived from Euclidean geometry (he learned the trick from Galileo, but everyone was at it in those days, even Spinoza) in order to conceal the (what he correctly recognised as heretical) source of his discovery, Cartesian analytical geometry.

Can you clarify what the fraud is? The standard narrative (see, I've picked up a fashionable term or two) used to be that he wrote the derivation of his physical work in classical terms because the world wasn't ready to understand a presentation in algebra and his own newly invented calculus, which of course would otherwise be the natural and superior way of presenting it. Even if he had the unworthy motive of protecting himself from losing his job and [fill in whatever the English were doing to heretics that year], it's not clear that that constitutes fraud per se. By the way, I of course reject categorically the notion that Galileo's presentation was a "trick". Just exactly how do Bruno and his friends think he ought to have presented the work instead? Do they in fact have any understanding whatever of what Galileo's work was? As you may see, I don't like accusations of fraud against valid scientific work which in its substance has stood up to 350 years of peer review; I regard it as a extraordinary claim requiring (as scientists believe) extraordinary support. Dandrake 02:04, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)

As Russell points out, this artifice of Newton's was not purely scientific, it was political, and it held back British scientific development for over a century.

My point in the context of the scientific revolution, was that both the historians and the scientists took an extraordinarily long time before they saw through this.

You can only trust scientists and historians once science and history have taken enough time to (as Bacon would have put it) put their work to the question.

Please note that the thrust of both the literary and anthropological criticism is not to 'deny' the scientific revolution, but instead it is to question it in the light of perspectives which, once the historical events have been considered, will leave a clearer picture of the phenomenon. (nobody is telling anyone to 'write the term out of the history books', just to add some fresh and important caveats). No literary critic or anthropologist is going to claim that the developments attributed to the scientific revolution weren't important, nor even that they were not necessarily attributable to a revolution, notr even that the revolution had nothing to do with science, but what they are doing is refusing to accept that the traditional 'linearity' of the relationships identified in this sentence fully describe the phenomena.

They are not denying or deprecating the scientific revolution, they are demythologising it and building a better account.

I can't believe that an encyclopedia would be satisfied with sustaining the mythology, such that Galileo, for instance, was as irreconcilably divorced from his protosientific contemporaries as he was truy represented by his recantation.

Well, I for one wouldn't try to sustain that mythology, because I can't figure out what it means. I can figure out pieces of it: "completely divorced from his protoscientific contemporaries"? Who on Earth would say that? He wasn't even divorced from his protoscientific predecessors, such as Tartaglia, from whom he got (proximately, anyway) the Euclidean methods that were essential to his analysis and that you for some reason seem to perceive as trickery.

As for "tru[l]y represented by his recantation", I don't know what to make of it, being unaware of anyone who has ever taken the recantation seriously as a statement of what Galileo believed. There may be something missing from my understanding of the slightly confusing "as ... as" construction in that sentence.

So I really don't have a position on it until I understand it.

This much I know: I'm not trying to stop anyone from investigating the history of science, and even digging up stuff I don't like. (The paragraph you moved is, as I mentioned before, not mine, so I don't feel really protective of it, though I mostly agree with it; more on that, maybe, another time.) I'm objecting to specific points that appear to be saying things that are unsupported or demonstrably wrong; for instance, the charge of fraud against Newton, which still hasn't been explained, and the "thought experiment" claim that I took out of the four-step plan because it represented (as I read it) an experimentally disproved assertion of fact.

By the way, after looking at the page history, I assume this is you, having accidentally got logged off, and not some third party? I'm going to work to cool my rhetroic a bit next time; but as you know, being a student of history of science, the word "fraud" is a serious red flag to wave at anyone who takes science seriously. Dandrake 22:49, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)

Just because the lit-crit and anthropo telescopes have imperfect and grimy lenses (lit-crit writers are their own worst enemies when it comes to putting even their simplest and most useful ideas into an intelligible form) are you saying that we should be afraid of looking through them ourselves?

Ericross

Here's the paragraph in question:

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Most historians of science dispute this view; all revolutions (scientific, social, politicial, historical) are non-instantaneous; all revolutions are always based on a number of historical precedents. Even the revolutionary development of Quantum mechanics in the early 20th century depended on a number of evolutionary steps, each based on findings from previous experiments. Thus, denying that the scientific revolution took place, or was of great importance, due to its evolutionary nature is facile. Given this view, one must deny that all revolutions of any sort have ever taken place.

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more history, less historiography

I was surprised to find so much historiography here, and almost nothing said about what happened.

It would be better to lay outline some of the history itself, and then append the historiographic material at the end. Or else start a new article about it.

The title of the article suggests that this should be an article about the scientific revolution itself, not about how historians feel about it.

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On the face of it, this sounds reasonable, and it is certainly what the ordinary reader would expect.

However, there is a problem. "The Scientific Revolution" is a category invented by historians in the 20th century. No one in the 17th century could have used such a phrase. Neither "scientific" nor "revolution" could be used in these senses.

The concept was developed, mainly at Cambridge and later in the US, for specific purposes. It was designed to show that the Royal Society, laissez-faire capitalism, English Protestantism, and the 1688 Settlement were the origins of modernity, not Catholic absolutism or the French Enlightenment, which led to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Anglo-American science, empiricism and democracy had won the Second World War, because they constitute Progress, unfettered by European ideologies.

Thus, wherever one starts the narrative of the Scientific Revolution, it always reaches a climax with Boyle, Locke and Newton. It's made that way. Chemistry and statistics have traditionally been embarrassing exceptions, to be ignored or explained away somehow.

In recent years, historians of science have abandoned "the Scientific Revolution" as a useful conceptual framework, and tend to see it as the name of a university course or a textbook, as a useful fiction for students' convenience, like "Feudal Society" or "Western Civilization". As a framework, it directs attention away from what was important in the creation and establishment of new knowledge at the time towards highly selective ancestor-worship of the supposed forefathers of modern science.

Historians are now well aware that the subjects and methods which were later taken into the 19th-century classification, "Science", were not necessarily the most influential in the thinking of any given group of natural philosophers in the 17th century. How the Bible was studied was at least as crucial as what trust could be placed on experimental results. Differing views of God's providence were supremely important. How truth claims came to be accepted was usually more significant than the specific content of the claims.

Unfortunately, this shift in historical analysis tends to be obscured by the popularity of the term "Scientific Revolution", because every student, general reader or practising scientist thinks that the meaning of "scientific" is perfectly transparent. The historiographical concept has been naturalized. Its political work has been successful, as can be seen from American diatribes on the superiority of Western Civilization over "medieval" Islam.

The article as it now stands is partly a product of recent trends in scholarship and partly of the reaction against those trends. Both aspects are ill-digested. For example, the present section on unidentified "literary critics" and "cultural materialism" is simply unrecognizable as having any coherent relationship to the scholarship. These labels apparently reflect the author's splenetic reaction to the work of historians of science, rather than being accurate descriptions of anyone at all.

I would suggest that the article should open with a clear, evenhanded statement of the historiographical issues, linked perhaps to a fuller discussion of how the scholarship has evolved, and then the events and developments in various intellectual fields of the period could be summarized.

• • David Harley, 2 March 2006

Indeed, and Floris-Cohen’s 1994 book The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographical Inquiry , would be a most useful reference work for this project recommended by Harley. In effect it charts the dilution and degeneration of the concept, in spite of the author’s own unproven faith that there was a scientific revolution (effected by Newton's Principia) and that it should not go the same way as the notion of ‘the Renaissance’, to be seen as laregly a myth. The main logical problem here is that you cannot provide a history of something that never was, but only a historiography of historians' blunders.

No satisfactory proof that there was a scientific revolution has ever been given. For a critique of the standard Koyrean thesis that the core of the supposed scientific revolution was that Newton’s dynamics comprised an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution, see my various comments on the Wikipedia ‘Discussion’ pages for ‘Inertia’ [to be found by text searching on ‘A.Bellamy’], especially ‘The historical misunderstanding of inertia’ in the Talk Archive #1 @ [[1]].

The following statement by Newton effectively knocks out the Koyrean anti-Aristotelian inertial- dynamics revolution thesis:

ISAAC NEWTON ON ARISTOTLE: "All those ancients knew the first law [of motion] who attributed to atoms in an infinite vacuum a motion which was rectilinear, extremely swift and perpetual because of the lack of resistance...ARISTOTLE was of the same mind, since he expresses his opinion thus [in On The Heavens, 3.2.301b]: 'If a body, destitute of gravity and levity, be moved, it is necessary that it be moved by an external force. And when it is once moved by a force, it will conserve its motion indefinitely'. And again in Book IV of the Physics, text 69, [i.e. Physics 4.8.215a19] speaking of motion in the void where there is no impediment he writes: 'Why a body once moved should come to rest anywhere no one can say. For why should it rest here rather than there ? Hence EITHER it will not be moved, OR it must be moved indefinitely, UNLESS something stronger impedes it [My caps].' " [From one of Newton's Scientific Papers in The Portsmouth Collection, first published in Hall & Hall's 1962 Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton.]

• • A.Bellamy 13 March 2006

Emergence ?

The recent changes to the Existence section seem to replace one definition with another, without saying so explicitly. On the one hand, there is the idea with respect to which the entire section was written: around 1600 certain major, rapid changes took place, as enumerated in the text that follows. On the other hand (as now changed) there is the idea of a long-drawn process that for reasons not specified is called revolution and that began around 1600.

It's perfectly reasonable to discuss conflicting concepts of "scientific revolution"; the section in question was written as a description one, with the reasons why it is widely accepted as a real revolution.

The section as modified gives nothing whatever to support the change. I'd take the liberty of saying that it's replacing one POV with another, without justification or discussion. How about an article that describes both and gives some reason for seeing the second definition as justified? Dandrake 23:24, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Since a month has passed with no one expressing a dissent, I've undertaken to change the text to eliminate such dismissive POV as describing one conception of the S R as a "notion". The text now says that it describes one position, and then describes it. As I said before, it would be a legitimate contribution if someone were to do the same for another conception of it. The question of the best subtitle remains open. Does anyone care? Dandrake 02:50, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Science also mathematical circa 1600

The article currently claims "At the beginning of the [17th] century, science was highly Aristotelian; at its end, science was mathematical, mechanical, and empirical." But science was also mathematical at the beginning of the 17th century, as such works as Galileo's 1590 De Motu and Kepler's 1607 Astronomia Nova both attest (or those of Benedetti and Tartaglia do, not to mention Tycho Brahe). The founder of the mathematical dynamical science of motion was Aristotle in his Physics (e.g. see Physics 7.5), with such as his basic law of motion that average speed v α F/R, where F = Force and R = Resistance (also see Sir Thomas Heath's Mathematics in Aristotle). Thus this false contrast should be deleted. --Logicus 18:12, 5 April 2006 (UTC)Logicus

Who are 'the literary critics' of the scientific revolution thesis ?

The article has a whole section on what it variously calls "the literary critics" and the "cultural materialist" critics of the scientific revolution thesis. But it notably fails to name any such critics or cite any reference works by these people that would enable the verification of its claims. Could it please do so. Does anybody know who they are ? --80.6.94.131 14:37, 9 April 2006 (UTC)Logicus

• I was about to ask myself what was going on in this section. It is not the case that only "literary critics" have criticized the historiography of the "scientific revolution" -- prominent historians and sociologists of science have made similar arguments as well. Anyway I will try and fix that up at some point. --Fastfission 01:45, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

• • Hey I agree, this section really needs work. Postmodern critiques of science and the philosophy and history therein are fine and indeed healthy and encyclopedic, but my first recommendation would be to change the title from "Literary Criticisms" to "Postmodern Criticisms" or something to that effect. Googling +"literary criticism" +"scientific revolution" has a lot of hits (23000 or so) but most of the top hits pertain to how the scientific revolution was a predecessor of literary criticism, not of how lit crits have challenged the historiography of the scientific revolution. --M a s 00:05, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

It is difficult to know what to do with the whole article as constituted, based as it is on the traditional but unproven and indeed mistaken claim that Newton’s Principia was somehow revolutionary, and in particular a revolution against Aristotelian science at the beginning of the 17th century in respect of being mechanical, experimental and mathematical. But the Principia was not anti-Aristotelian, Newton himself attributed its first law of motion to Aristotle, and it was no more experimental and observational nor more mathematical than science at the beginning of the 17th century. And nor was it mechanistic, but rather posited anti-mechanistic inherent powers of matter such as the force of inertia and gravity, being specifically polemically conceived by Newton as the refutation of anti-Aristotelian Cartesian mechanism and its attempt to reduce the science of motion to kinematics by eliminating inherent powers of matter and forces such as posited in dynamics. [See Newton’s anti-Cartesian polemic De Gravitatione written just before the Principia , published in Hall & Hall Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton 1962.] Newton restored the Aristotelian dynamical approach to the science of motion. Hence if Wikipedia wishes to persist in its claim that there was a scientific revolution, it must at least change its basis to some more tenable thesis on what was revolutionary. --80.6.94.131 18:14, 8 May 2006 (UTC)Logicus

What? --M a s 16:10, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

What I mean is, critiquing Newton the man is Ok, criquing the Victorian romantization is probably healthy as well. But aren't the peers and contemporaries of Newton a closer judge of his "revolution" than you or I or Wikipedia in general? Alexander Pope wasn't writing in the 21st c. after Derrida and Feyerbrand and all when he wrote his epitaph. The Bernoulli gang couldn't have found the curve of constant decent without the inverse-square law. Gauss wouldn't have been interested in curve fitting if not for the errors he got when he fit his observations to Newton. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be descriptive, not normative. People do use the phrase "Scientific Revolution" and the Wikipedia article should describe why people use it, what it means to them, what is the history behind the term, what's the basis of modern critiques of the term... --M a s 16:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Newton's Principia - a non-revolutionary great scientific achievement ?

The theory that there was a Scientific Revolution is now part of a general historiographical theory that all great scientific achievements are revolutionary implied by such as Kuhn in the prevailing conventional wisdom that any innovation in science is a revolutionary 'paradigm-shift'. The Scientific Revolution itself was allegedly the mother of all revolutions whose modelling by Koyre as a Bachelardian mutation was the paradigm of Kuhn's general model to which Kuhn added a top-dressing of the later Wittgenstein's paradigms and incommensurable linguistic concept-games. This view that great scientific achievements are revolutionary seems so ingrained that to deny something is revolutionary is nowadays interpeted as denying it is a great achievement. M a s seems to fall into this error.

Comments on M a s

M a s writes above on 9 May: "What I mean is, critiquing Newton the man is Ok,..."

But I am not "critiquing Newton". You mistakenly infer that to say something is not revolutionary is to criticise it and that I thereby somehow deny the Principia was a great scientific achievement, which I do not. For I am not criticising Newton the man nor his Principia and its important innovations, but rather the historiographical theory that great scientific achievements are revolutionary. This is because I maintain contra Kuhn and others that science develops by REFORMATIONS of its theoretical systems rather than by revolution and their wholesale overthrow. Hence I only deny Newton's great scientific achievement in the Principia was revolutionary, not that it was a great and innovative scientific achievement. In particular it did not overthrow the Aristotelian dynamical programme in the science of motion as traditionally claimed. Rather it only creatively revised and reformed it as it had come to be developed by Galileo and Kepler with its two different major auxiliary theories of impetus and of inertia. Newton synthesised them into his core concept of the inherent force of inertia that causes the continuation of uniform motion, like impetus, and resists accelerated motion, like Kepler's inertia. In short, the Principia was a great scientific achievement not by being revolutionary, but by virtue of being a creative further development and reformation of Aristotelian dynamics as it had evolved by gradual reforms in response to criticism over two millenia, and to which Newton applied his great but non-revolutionary mathematical innovation of the theory of fluxions.

Against revolutionist history of science I maintain it is thoroughly implausible that humanity is capable of overthrowing all its basic assumptions at once as in Kuhn's culturally prevailing theory of scientific development; revolutionist historiography also produces bad history of science that overlooks or air brushes out the missing links of gradual evolution to create the false impresion of revolutionary discontinuity. It is also potentially demoralising for the science education of young people to portray the greatest scientific achievements as herculean imaginative feats of total revolution of which only the most exceptional geniuses are capable, rather than more limited piecemeal reforms that just revise part of the whole system rather than wholly overthrow it and that can be gradually achieved by dogged perseverance and hard work as with Newton. Specifically note that Newton himself said in the Principia that its three laws of motion were already well known to mathematicians.

M a s askes: "But aren't the peers and contemporaries of Newton a closer judge of his "revolution" than you or I or Wikipedia in general? Alexander Pope wasn't writing in the 21st c. after Derrida and Feyerbrand and all when he wrote his epitaph."

Here M a s begs the very question of whether Newton did effect a revolution by supposing he did. Maybe he meant to say 'a closer judge of whether he was revolutionary than you or I or Wikipedia...'. But I am not aware that any of Newton's contemporaries regarded the Principia as revolutionary in respect of overthrowing some all-prevailing orthodoxy, albeit it was clearly intended to restore Aristotelian dynamics against anti-Aristotelian Cartesian kinematics in the science of motion. Do you know of any of Newton's contemporaries who did ? (Would you wish to argue Voltaire thought Newton was revolutionary, just because he maintained the space of the solar system was largely empty compared with the model of the solar system in continental Cartesian celestial physics ?) And I certainly cannot recall that Pope's epitaph claimed the Principia or Newton were revolutionary, however much light it claimed they turned on. And with respect to the 20th century claim that Newton was revolutionary because he overthrew Aristotelian dynamics, Newton himself made no such claim and even attributed his first law to Aristotle. And certainly one of Newton's leading contemporaries, the Principia's English translator Andrew Motte, in his own 1729 book on Newtonian dynamics A Treatise on the Mechanical Powers, justified its first law of motion in the very same terms as Aristotle's Physics 215a19-22 that Newton cited as his first law of motion, namely 'once moving, there is no reason why it should ever stop here rather than there'. D'Alembert also did so.

M a s's interesting observations on the prior indispensibility of Newton's Principia to the contributions of the Bernoulli's and Gauss mentioned are surely red herrings inasmuch as these contributions do not establish the Principia was revolutionary, however great its innovations, which did not by the way include 'the inverse square law', already well known before the Principia.

M a s advises: "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be descriptive, not normative. People do use the phrase "Scientific Revolution" and the Wikipedia article should describe why people use it, what it means to them, what is the history behind the term, what's the basis of modern critiques of the term"

I largely agree with these principles, and am not aware of breaching them, whereas the current Wikipedia article clearly takes sides on the affirmative side in the debate over whether there was a Scientific Revolution.

In spite of the useful contributions of Fastfission and M a s, we still have no names for who the alleged literary critics of the Scientific Revolution thesis are. --80.6.94.131 18:12, 10 May 2006 (UTC)LOGICUS

Thanks for the continuing conversation Logicus. Methinks Logicus ascribes too many motives to Newton. Likewise I think Logicus might set the threshold too high for what could be considered a "revolution." Then the definitional problem becomes a sorites - one or two good ideas don't make a revolution, three or four don't either, but after 100 years or so, then it's maybe a revolution.

Or Logicus denies historians their poetic license to use the phrase "revolution" metaphorically ala Jefferson or Voltaire or I say, tongue-in-cheek, other great men. On that note I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about the education of young minds, but likewise I think it does a disservice to say or imply that science pre-17th C linearly progressed throughout to science post-18th C, without emphasizing the biographies, society and culture of the peoples who made contribitions.

I grant that much of the 19th C ideals about history are like Ozymandias, sands stretching far away. I recognize that Logicus is not critiquing this strawman necessarily, but is instead critiquing Kuhn (because this "revolution" was his favorite case study). But I see in this and similar postmodern interpretations a rejection of biography for the sake of society and culture. The pendulum swings, I suppose.

Thanks, --M a s 22:18, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS REPLIES TO MAS[In square brackets]:

MAS: "Methinks Logicus ascribes too many motives to Newton." [Given you profess concern with biography, I challenge you to name just one motive I ascribed to Newton that was documentably too many i.e. was not one of his motives.]

MAS: "Likewise I think Logicus might set the threshold too high for what could be considered a "revolution." Then the definitional problem becomes a sorites - one or two good ideas don't make a revolution, three or four don't either, but after 100 years or so, then it's maybe a revolution." [This is an interesting logical point, but misplaced here. For the way the issue of the Scientific Revolution has traditionally been set up, it is not a question of any number of new GOOD ideas, but rather of the REJECTION and REPLACEMENT of OLD ideas by NEW ones that logically CONTRADICT them, its traditional modernity tale being that of the overthrow of the ancient and medieval Aristotelian framework of natural philosophy and its science of motion that was contradicted and replaced by that of the Principia. On this basis any number of good ideas would still not constitute a revolution if they do not overthrow any old ideas. Thus, for example, on this basis Newton's importantly innovative mathematical theory of fluxions was not revolutionary because however innovative it did not contradict and overthrow any previous mathematical theory, but was rather a creative supplement that filled a gap rather than displaced some prior theory.

In general it is certainly not my wish to play Humpty Dumpty and dictate the meaning of 'revolution' in order to eliminate the Scientific Revolution merely by definition, but rather to do so by substantive critical reassessment of its factual historical misrepresentations, such as the false claim that Aristotle's dynamics was non-mathematical, refuted by Physics 7.5 for example, and hence to claim that the 'mathematisation of nature and dynamics' by such as Galileo and Newton was revolutionary because it overthrew a purely qualitative Aristotelian physics, as Wikipedia did before my editing. It is also false to claim the Principia was mechanist and did not appeal to occult forces, as the Wikipedia article originally claimed, or that Aristotle's dynamics held that bodies inherently resist all motion or that their speed is proportional to their weight in free-fall as Philoponan dyanics claimed. Thus in factually contesting the alleged facts of revolution, I adhere to the traditional meaning of 'revolution' in this historical context as the rejection and overthrow of key principles in some domain by others that logically contradicted and replaced them.

Thus the issue of revolution or not in this sense is not a question of any number of new ideas over whatever period of time, but rather the LOGICAL issue of whether and when all the principles of a prevailing theory, or at least its core principles, have all been REPLACED or not by others that CONTRADICT them. Hence with respect to the original Scientific Revolution thesis that Newton's dynamics overthrew Aristotle's, the simple question is whether it did or not in this sense of contradicting and replacing its key principles. And to date the thesis that it did remains logically unproven. In its original form that Newton's first law of motion was denied by Aristotle's dynamics, it is demonstrably false because if Aristotle had logically denied it and thus asserted that locomotion in a void would terminate, then he would have thereby invalidated his own proof of the impossibility of locomotion in a void in Physics 215a19-22 on the ground that it would be interminable. Moreover Newton himself quoted this very passage as essentially asserting his first law in respect of its principle of the continuation of externally unforced and unresisted motion in a void without gravity:

NEWTON: "All those ancients knew the first law [of motion] who attributed to atoms in an infinite vacuum a motion which was rectilinear, extremely swift and perpetual because of the lack of resistance...ARISTOTLE was of the same mind, since he expresses his opinion thus [in On The Heavens, 3.2.301b]: 'If a body, destitute of gravity and levity, be moved, it is necessary that it be moved by an external force. And when it is once moved by a force, it will conserve its motion indefinitely'. And again in [Physics 215a19-22} he writes: 'Why a body once moved should come to rest anywhere no one can say. For why should it rest here rather than there ? Hence EITHER it will not be moved, OR it must be moved indefinitely, UNLESS something stronger impedes it [My caps].' " [From one of Newton's Scientific Papers in The Portsmouth Collection, first published in Hall & Hall's 1962 Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton.]

So what basic principles of 17th century Aristotelian dynamics, if any, did Newton's Principia overthrow ?]

MAS:"Or Logicus denies historians their poetic license to use the phrase "revolution" metaphorically ala Jefferson or Voltaire or I say, tongue-in-cheek, other great men." ['Poetic licence' may be appropriate for the history of poetry, but is surely inappropriate where analysing claims about the logic and methodology of scientific discovery and development is concerned given the Wikipedia article claims, albeit without any evidence, that the alleged 'scientific revolution' was a revolutionary change in scientific method. But where did Jefferson and Voltaire use the phrase 'revolution' metaphorically ? Can you cite any examples ? ]

MAS: "On that note I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about the education of young minds, but likewise I think it does a disservice to say or imply that science pre-17th C linearly progressed throughout to science post-18th C, without emphasizing the biographies, society and culture of the peoples who made contribitions." [But I neither say nor imply any linear progression of science, let alone without emphasizing the biography, society and culture of its contributors. To the contrary I am primarily concerned with analysing the non-linear dialectical evolution of Aristotelian dynamics from Aristotle's Physics into Newton's Principia as an empirical problem-solving process of trial and error and the gradual emergence of Newton's axiomatisation of Aristotelian dynamics by way of its development and criticism by the dynamics of such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, Philoponus, Avicenna, Averroes, Buridan, Oresme, Benedetti, Galileo and Kepler and others. For example, in the case of the first law, as Newton points out it was essentially already stated by Aristotle, although this is overlooked by those who do not read Newton's published writings fully. But then it was apparently denied by Philoponan evanescent impetus dynamics that supposedly predicted the termination of any projectile motion in a void when its self-decaying impetus expired. It was also denied by Kepler's novel 'inertial' variant of Aristotelian dynamics, stemming from Averroes, with his novel auxiliary theory that posited all bodies have 'inertia', a non-gravitational inherent resistance to all motion in proportion to their mass that would terminate unforced motion in a void. Kepler's innovation of 'inertia' was to prevent Aristotle's law of motion v α F/R predicting externally unresisted forced motion (F > 0 & R = 0), like planetary motion in Kepler's celestial dynamics, would be infinitely fast because v α F/0 since bodies have no non-gravitational inherent resistance to motion in Aristotle's original dynamics, because then Aristotle's v α F/R would become v α F/m rather than v α F/0. But Newton then restored the Aristotelian 'principle of inertia' by revising Kepler's theory of inertia by positing inertia only resists all motion EXCEPT uniform motion, whereby externally unforced motion in a void would not be terminated by inertia. And by virtue of the critical contributions of Philoponus, Avicenna and Averroes-Kepler, Aristotle's law of motion v α F/R was eventually transformed into Newton's second law a α (F-R)/m. Is this lightningly brief sketch sufficiently non-linear and appreciative of other contributors for you ?]

MAS: "I grant that much of the 19th C ideals about history are like Ozymandias, sands stretching far away. I recognize that Logicus is not critiquing this strawman necessarily, but is instead critiquing Kuhn (because this "revolution" was his favorite case study). But I see in this and similar postmodern interpretations a rejection of biography for the sake of society and culture. The pendulum swings, I suppose. Thanks, --M a s 22:18, 10 May 2006 [You see what is not there ! I am not arguing about any 19th century ideals about history nor about Ozymandias so far as I am aware, but if anything against Vico's theory of discontinuous historical blocks, such as ancient, medieval and modern science, the theory of the scientific revolution being an attempt to constitute a total discontinuity between medieval and modern science. Nor am I giving a "postmodern interpretation", but rather arguing that post-medieval 'modernity' as constituted by the alleged Scientific Revolution is a myth, and whereby so is post-modernity. Nor do I 'reject biography for the sake of society and culture'. In fact apparently unlike others I actually bother to read the works of the scientists themselves, such as Aristotle, Galileo and Newton, and with a careful logical scrutiny. And I find a very different picture of their theories emerges from that portrayed by historians of the scientific revolution, typically the antithesis. But certainly here I am only concerned with the objective LOGIC of the development of scientific theories and of scientific method rather than the history of people, noting that the traditional theory of the scientific revolution is a fantastical mythological historical fairy tale of the origin of 'the modern scientific method' and the overthrow of Aristotelian philosophy.

The problem here is not one of swinging pendulums and changing intellectual fashions, but the bog-standard problem of providing a truthful historically accurate account of the facts of scientific development most importantly for the purpose of science education. For example it is surely a monumental scandal that schoolchildren are taught, as Wikipedia also claims, that Galileo discovered the correct law of free-fall, when in fact his scholastic universal law of free-fall that purely gravitationally accelerated motion is uniformly accelerated, the fundamental law of his celestial dynamics, was radically mistaken because like the scholastics he mistakenly thought gravity was a universal constant rather than a variable, it was never generally accepted, and it was certainly rejected by Proposition 32 of Book 1 of Newton's Principia, according to which gravitational fall is exponentially increasingly accelerated inversely to distance. Galileo's theory of free-fall in his Dialogo and Discorsi was justly publcily ridiculed by Fermat, and its rejection was fundamental to the development of Newton's gravitational celestial dynamics. The kinematical analytic truth that in uniformly accelerated motion s = gtt/2, whose discovery was not original to Galileo, should not be conflated with the radical empirical falsehood that gravitational fall is universally uniformly accelerated. [e.g. see Koyre's paper A documentary history of free-fall]. Thus, for example, whereas in his Dialogo Galileo publicly derided the jesuit Father Scheiner for predicting it would take a canonball about 5 days to fall from the altitude of the lunar orbit because he predicted it would take less than 4 hours because of his radically mistaken theory that gravitational fall is uniformly accelerated, as even Stillman Drake sheepishly admits, Scheiner was very near the truth and Galileo grossly mistaken, replete with his radical underestimation of the actual rate of gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface at about half its real value to boot. But the standard theory of the scientific revolution is replete with such highly misleading nonsense as that Galileo discovered some correct law of free-fall by experiment. --80.6.94.131 15:57, 16 June 2006 (UTC)LOGICUS

Thanks again Logicus. If I can sum your arguments up as I see it, you demand that a "revolution" be a a complete (1.) rejection of one style of philosophy or way of thinking about the world in favour of another, (2.) correct, philosophy or way of thinking of the world, and just as importantly the two philosophies must be logically contradictory (3.) Or, I think more accurately, you claim that others attach this meaning to revolution, and then apply that thinking to the events that took place around the 17thC.

And then you go on, with a careful reading of the original texts, to argue that in reality, pre-17thC science was not logically contradictory to post-17thC science. You apply a strict, almost sentential logical approach to the readings of the text.

And then from this, you argue that no revolution took place.

I cannot defend this definition of revolution- all things follow from a contradiction. If pre-17th C science had claimed that 2 + 2 = 5, then by using some sophisticated sentential logical argument we could argue that pre17th C science could also claim that the moon is made of cheese. In other words, with this definition of revolution, we could argue that pre-17thC science could have got absolutely everything wrong.

And then I cannot also appreciate the appeal to reading the original works as strictly and as hermaneuticly as has been done above. Godel found a logical fallacy in the the United States Constitution, but darned if a real revolution hadn't taken place.

Rather, I think the historians who use the "Scientific Revolution" are quite aware that pre-17thC science had gotten a lot of the way of the world right, but was incomplete. And post-17thC was right as well, but a little more complete. And 21stC is even more "right" but yet still incomplete. --M a s 22:10, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Bacon...

"Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose greatest scientific experiment amounted to stuffing snow into a dead chicken, nevertheless penned inductive reasoning, proceeding from observation and experimentation." This seems to downplay the Baconian Method, which is basically the foudation of science as it is done today. However, changing it seems a bit trivial, and this is hardly the place to discuss the importance of the Baconian Method.

Logicus comments: Even if, contra hypothetico-deductivism, science were inductive, proceeding from observation and experimentation as claimed here, the question would still remain of how Bacon's method went beyond the empirical inductivist methodology of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics in any respect. --80.6.94.131 18:08, 30 May 2006 (UTC)Logicus

Dante

In the section Early and medieval views of science, Dante is named as one of the key influences. Does he really belong in a list with figures like Galen and Aristotle? Isn't he following received opinion rather than determining it?

I agree. Dante is not, to my very feeble knowledge of the period, a major scientific influence, and the idea of the four elements goes back considerably earlier than him. (I'd venture it probably gets traced back to the Greeks but I'd let someone more educated in this period fill that in. I know next to nothing). --Fastfission 02:57, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Good removal. See four elements - Greeks are ca 450BC. --M a s 15:36, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Koyre in 1939?

I'm not one to doubt Steve Shapin, but I'm sure he means something more subtle than Koyre was the first one to use the term 'scientific revolution' to define the changes in the 16th-18th century? A quick JSTOR search for "scientific revolution" comes up with dozens of pre-1939 usages of the term in this context, referring specifically to the work by Galileo and Newton and the like. OED gives an entry from 1803: "1803 S. MILLER Brief Retrospect of Eighteenth Cent. I. II. 416 The frequency and rapidity of scientific revolutions may be accounted for in various ways." Perhaps someone can clarify..? (I don't have a copy of the book on hand, but I could get one if necessary) --Fastfission 01:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I think there's been a good deal of revisionist history on this article. I think it's in need of an expert.

I have no idea what to make of, e.g.,

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. But it also and more crucially arises from disagreements over the historical facts about different theories and their logical analysis, e.g. Did Aristotle's dynamics deny the principle of inertia or not ? Did science become mechanistic ? --M a s 15:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

What is meant by mechanistic? Also, what's up with the irony quotes in:

The Aristotelian scientific tradition's primary mode of interacting with the world was through observation and searching for "natural" circumstances. It saw what we would today consider "experiments" to be contrivances which at best revealed only contingent and un-universal facts about nature in an artificial state. Coupled with this approach was the belief that rare events which seemed to contradict theoretical models were "monsters", telling nothing about nature as it "naturally" was.

Thanks, --M a s 15:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Um, the first quote needs help from someone with considerable expertise in sci-rev historiography. More expertise than I have, anyway. I infer that the scare-quotes in the second quote have been added to indicate that the terms have specialized meanings here. "Natural" has specific meanings in Aristotelian discourse; here it refers to what objects, animals, elements, etc., do "by nature," that is, when they are left alone and not interfered with. "Experiments" means experiments in the modern sense, with controlled and contrived circumstances, as opposed to "experiments" in the literature of medieval science, which is synonymous with "experiences" (this word tends to confuse newcomers to the subject). "Monsters" are aberrations, including not just monsters in the modern sense but also comets and all sorts of prodigies. They fall outside the normal course of, er, "nature." All this should probably be explained, with proper references. Maestlin 16:42, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I think I wrote the second one. The source for that is, I think, Peter Dear's Discipline and Experience. --Fastfission 19:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

The relevant Shapin quote (p.2) is: "The phrase "the Scientific Revolution" was probably coined by Alexandre Koyré in 1939, and it first became a book title in A. Rupert Hall's The Scientific Revolution of 1954." The sentence has a footnote: "In the 1930s the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard referred to "mutations" (or large-scale discontinuities) in the development of the conceptual structure of science, a usage Koyré soon developed: 'The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was without a doubt such a mutation... It was a profound intellectual transformation of which modern... was both the expression and the fruit."

Hope that helps.--ragesoss 19:11, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

That's really strange. I'm pretty sure he's wrong on it being coined in 1939. Very odd. Not worth stressing over, but maybe we should use his actual quote in the article, just to futher credit whose statement it is. --`Fastfission 19:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I did put Floris Cohen's book The Scientific Revolution in the References to help out with such issues as discussed here. Look at its page 21, and also take a look at Bernard Cohen's book on the history of the notion of scientific revolution. --80.6.94.131 18:13, 15 June 2006 (UTC)Logicus

Some interesting points and issues have been raised here on which I shall comment asap. Immediately note Koyre was replying to Duhem's massive historical challenge to Mach's claim in his Science of Mechanics that Galileo invented dynamics since he wrongly presumed Newton said so in the Principia, whereas Newton only said his 3 laws of motion were already well known to mathematicians and that Galileo had used the first two in his analysis of projectile motion. The most interesting question here is when Newton's dynamics was first characterised as revolutionary and as a revolution against Aristotelian dynamics, because this was the original nub of the 'scientific revolution' thesis. Meanwhile also see my replies to Mas a few sections above. --80.6.94.131 16:14, 16 June 2006 (UTC)LOGICUS

Bacon & Hooke

The Bacon anecdote about chicken-stuffing is a myth -- see John Gribbin, The Fellowship, Allen Lane, 2005. And surely Robert Hooke should be in the list of important pioneers?

Charlie T 20 August 2006

This article really needs focus and improvement

I just did a comparison and found that scarcely any significant changes have been made since this article was designated History of Science Collaboration of the Month. Let me make a few random comments:

I think this topic is very important; as Herbert Butterfield said:

Since [the Scientific R]evolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world — since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics — iit outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes — mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.

Can we tell why Butterfield thought it was so important and why Shapin doubts that it took place? This article scarcely tries.

Looking through its sections I'd rate them:

• Introduction — Fair

1. Emergence of the revolution — Fair
2. Early and medieval views of science — Long, but weak; only need to summarize the medieval world view
3. Infusion of classical texts — Superfluous Delete
4. New scientific developments — Just a catalogue Delete
5. Theoretical developments — Needs organization
6. Methodological developments — Needs organization and additions; its more than just mechanization and empiricism (see the range of approaches facing Newton that Westfall discusses in the first chapter of Never at Rest
   1. Mechanization — Fair
   2. Empiricism — Even Koyré wouldn't buy this stereotype
7. Postmodern critiques — What critiques are meant, citations please (If it can't be justified, delete it)

As a medievalist I shouldn't say this, but I'm disturbed to see an article on the Scientific Revolution beginning with a section on ancient science, and then going on to the recovery of ancient learning in the Twelfth Century. When asked to fix a starting point, I've always had the Scientific Revolution begin in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus and Vesalius's Fabrica. Looking for an ending point, I fudge and make it the death of Newton in 1727.

Maybe we should start improvements to the article within something like those limits. It is an important topic. --SteveMcCluskey 02:57, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Proposed Outline

Rather than just gripe about it, I thought I'd put up an outline for a new article.

I've also decided to copy the present article to User:SteveMcCluskey/Scientific Revolution where everyone is invited to engage in radical revisions. I'll be away the rest of today so I won't make many changes until tomorrow.

"The desire to edit is a basic human need."

--SteveMcCluskey 15:05, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

• Introduction

1. Significance of the "Revolution"
2. Ancient and medieval background
3. Transformational developments and their reception
   1. Copernicus's De revolutionibus
   2. Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica
4. New Approaches to Nature
   1. The Mechanical Philosophy
   2. The Chemical Philosophy
   3. Empiricism
   4. Mathematization
5. Subsequent Developments
   1. The New Astronomy
      1. Kepler
      2. Brahe
      3. Galileo
   2. The New Physics
      1. Galileo
      2. Newton's Principia
6. Institutional changes
   1. The changing role of patronage
   2. Networks of communication
      1. Printing
   3. Scientific societies

Partial changes made

I've just dumped the changes I've made incorporating the first two sections of this outline into the article. In real life my inbasket is overflowing so I'm taking a wikibreak and will remove the working draft from my userpages.

The rest of the article is still a bit of a shambles -- as a work in progress it's still redundant (and even self-contradictory). A bit from the section on Post-Modern critiques (perhaps stressing Shapin more than unnamed "postmodern"critics) could go in the section on Significance of the "revolution".

See you in a month or so; have fun with this. --SteveMcCluskey 15:07, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Newton on the Scientific Revolution

The recent changes by Logicus rely heavily on the interpretation of a direct quotation from Newton, in which Newton claims that his first law of motion was already known to the ancient atomists and to Aristotle. Most Newton scholars recognize Newton's claims for the antiquity of his ideas as a recurring theme in his writings.

The fact that Newton claimed that his ideas were in Aristotle or in other ancient sources, does not necessarily mean that they actually were. Primary sources like this require careful analysis by historians familiar with Newton, his life, his achievements, and in this case, with the content of Aristotle's Physics and its later influence. That is one of the reasons why Wikipedia cautions against the use of Primary sources and has a strict policy against Original Research. --SteveMcCluskey 01:33, 11 September 2006 (UTC)