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HIST 102 #16 - The First Scientific Revolution

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you

hello welcome back to our lecture series

for Western Civilization 102. our

previous lecture you heard from Mr

Elliott discussing the Glorious

Revolution to the Treaty of Utrecht

basically what was happening in Europe

during the reign of that great French

King Louis XIV

obviously you heard quite a lot about

Warfare even though it wasn't

religiously based as we've seen in

previous lectures quite a lot of warfare

was occurring in the 17th century Dr

Robinson actually called it a general

crisis because of all the fighting that

had been taking place

well we're going to switch gears a

little bit with this lecture and we're

going to discuss the first Scientific Revolution

now

before you of course learn more about

the the different figures that will make

up the Scientific Revolution and what

they discovered and what European

Society will be learning

um a little bit about the background to

the uh before prior to the 17th century

in this first Scientific Revolution you

know traditional views of astronomy you

may have heard of the geocentric theory

geocentric of course meaning the Earth

was at the center of the universe now we

learned this in probably Elementary

School we know the Earth is not the

center of the universe okay but that's

what people believed prior to this

Scientific Revolution and we see with

the Scientific Revolution that there are people

people

that will challenge

these ideas these traditional views of

not only astronomy but medicine

mathematics you name it and they will

question it and come up with different

theories of course

so prior to the 17th century the prior

to the first Scientific Revolution

people believe that the Earth was the

center of the universe geocentric theory

because I mean obviously the sun if you

look into the sky which is not good for

your eyes but if you look at the sky you

see the sun traveling of course moving

across the sky and and you yourself feel

like you're not moving well of course

you would think that everything moves

around you okay obviously we know better now

now

um as far as medicine went uh

a lot of people believe that the body

was made up of what's called four humors

h-u-m-o-r-s humors

not very appetizing humors by the way

black bile yellow bile blood and phlegm

people felt that your body was made up

of these four humors black bile yellow

bile blood and phlegm and when these

humors were out of balance that means

you were sick

and so you would do you know different

things to make sure they they went back

into a balanced state

popular method would be bleeding I know

you you may have heard of this in other

classes or just even on TV different

shows leeches were commonly used even

even up until the time of George

Washington in American history to kind

of relate it George Washington our

president American history had a really

bad cold one time and they they bled him

they put leeches on him now actually

leeches are used

in medicine today to help with

infections skin infections and such so

they do use them in certain areas but

not to bleed the patient to where they

balance the humors as they felt that was

the case there were other methods

purging was one method that was used as

well not exactly going to help a very

sick person get well so medicine we're

going to see advances in medicine and

people realizing

um you know what's happening within the

body to to cause people to be sick or

ill and you'll hear more about that as well

well technology

technology

will come into play with this first

Scientific Revolution you may have heard

of the telescope in Galileo looking into

looking at the heavens and looking at

the mountains of the moons of Jupiter

Galileo of course being one of the

important figures here during this

Scientific Revolution

and of course math different aspects of

mathematics with navigation and and just

the basic nature of things will be

studied and pondered during the first

Scientific Revolution you hear about men

such as Copernicus and his heliocentric

theory stating that the Earth orbits

around the Sun that we are not the

center of everything okay we're just

part of the whole orbiting of the earth

of course this is going to lead to

questions of how do the planets orbit is

it a circular motion is it elliptical

what keeps the planets

from not simply just moving out into

space you know we know these answers we

know these answers today but you know

back in

during the Scientific Revolution these

men are having to come up with theories

on this okay

so we'll have we'll we'll hear about

you'll probably hear about Kepler very

famous German astronomer

and he agreed with Copernicus but he

will he will advance copernicus's Theory

talking about the planets and the uh the

attraction of the planets to the sun

Galileo I mentioned him obviously very

famous even looks at the spots on the

Sun as well

um he Galileo obviously has problems

with the church because just to let you

know that the church isn't very

open-minded about these new discoveries

and these new scientific um

uh advances and some

some of these people especially I'm

thinking Galileo will have to defend

themselves go to trial and Galileo

although he's not executed he's not he

is placed under house arrest by the

church because

of his um

his uh ideas on science

oh Sir Isaac Newton know you have had to

have heard of Sir Isaac Newton he was an Englishman

Englishman um

uh interesting fellow Sir Isaac Newton

discovered calculus aren't we happy

about him don't we love Sir Isaac Newton

discovered calculus in a few weeks it

takes most of us quite a while to grasp

calculus but it can be done uh

the laws of universal gravitation gravity

gravity

um every object continues in a state of

rest in a straight line unless deflected

by a force

for every action there isn't there is

always an equal and opposite reaction

all these come to mind from maybe some

of your science classes as well medicine

during the Scientific Revolution like I

said people are starting to find out

more about the body the human body and

how it functions during this first

Scientific Revolution

we also have people I like Descartes you

may have heard of Descartes he's famous

for I think therefore I am

and he will come up with a rational

approach to the scientific method

deductive method

you may hear about him as well so quite

a lot of figures during the Scientific

Revolution I'm very interesting to see

how it will affect later societies

because here with this Scientific

Revolution we will see the roots of uh

what we'll study in our next lecture

which is The Enlightenment so let's find

out a little bit more about the first

Scientific Revolution

the Renaissance the reformation and the

age of Discovery all dramatically

changed the way that early modern men

and women thought about the world

the first Scientific Revolution changed

the way that they thought about the

universe as a whole

the first Scientific Revolution really

began in the 16th century but it reached

its peak in the 17th before we talk

about it however it's necessary to look

at what people believed about the

universe before the first scientific

revolution in order to measure the full

impact that the changes of the

Scientific Revolution brought about

therefore will at first take a look at

the late medieval synthesis in looking

at the universe and then we'll break

that down as new scientists come on the scene

scene

the late medieval synthesis that that

made up the way that people looked at

the universe consisted of a number of

elements there was Aristotelian physics

ptolemaic astronomy Hippocratic

physiology glenic medicine

the hierarchical principle The Great

chain of being

Alchemy and astrology magic and

Witchcraft Christian Theology and what I

like to call apparent Common Sense let's

look at those individually

in Aristotelian physics that is physics

as explained by the ancient Greek

philosopher Aristotle who was also a

scientist uh there were a number of

features which in fact are wrong but

which had enormous consequences for the

way that people looked at the world and

the universe in the Middle Ages

in terms of motion Aristotle believed

that the natural tendency of matter is

to be at rest

he also believed that the heaviest

bodies in the universe naturally tend to

fall toward the center of the universe

the Earth itself is of course solid and

heavy and by the terms of Aristotle's

view of things it was indeed the

heaviest object in the universe

the reason for this is that Aristotle

believed in what we call a geocentric

universe that is an earth-centered

Universe in which the Earth is literally

at the center and everything else

revolves around the Earth

that of course as we know today is wrong

and in fact even an Aristotle Zone day

there had been people who knew it was

wrong like the philosopher Aristophanes

who argued instead for something called

heliocentrism where the Earth orbits the

Sun but aristophanese was rejected like

hundreds of others who came after him

because who was he to contradict the

great Aristotle

now let's add to Aristotelian physics

ptolemaic astronomy Ptolemy was an

ancient second Century A.D thinker who

also believed in a geocentric universe

but who added some additional elements

he believed that the Earth is surrounded

by a number of concentric crystalline

spheres or if you want to think of it

that way giant glass balls of increasing

size into which all of these celestial

objects the Sun the moon the planets the

stars are set

and according to Ptolemy these spheres

circle around the earth and that is what

gives us the appearance of the Sun the

moon the stars and the planets moving

across the sky

in addition to that he believed that

outside of this set of concentric

spheres there was one final sphere known

as the Prima mobile or first mover which

kept all the rest in motion and

presumably what kept it in motion was God

God

another aspect of ptolemaic astronomy is

that Ptolemy taught that the farther out

you go from Earth the more pure the

objects there are so there is an

ascending order of Purity from the earth

at the center working our way out to

greater and greater purity

this is a hierarchical principle the

notion of hierarchy of Purity from

lowest at the Earth to highest at the extreme

extreme

added to that there is also medieval

theology in medieval theology the

characteristic of heaviness was

associated with corruption not

corruption like political corruption or

financial corruption but with actual

Decay physical Decay or rot and it

stands to reason that if we put all this

together if the Earth is at the center

of the universe if that makes it the

heaviest object in the universe that it

is also the most rotten object in the

universe and indeed that's pretty much

what medieval theology taught that the

Earth is a place sunk in sin and

Corruption sort of the Cesspool of the universe

universe

and think about traditional views in the

Middle Ages of where hell and heaven are

located hell is thought to be at the

center of the earth Heaven is thought to

be as far away from that as you can get

it fits into that hierarchical principle of

greatly increasing Purity from the

corruption of Earth with hell at its

Center to the purest of Heaven out at

the extreme now

now

the geocentric model

makes a certain amount of sense in terms

of its internal logic in other words it

all works this is not actually how the

universe is organized we no longer think

in religious terms of a hell literally

located at the center of the Earth or a

heaven literally out there as far as you

can go but it has a certain amount of

internal consistency so it makes a good

deal of sense

in addition to that there are other

elements that we can add one of these is

what I like to call apparent common

sense that is what looks like common

sense but may turn out to be deceptive

for example

celestial objects like the sun and the

moon and the planets and the stars all

seem to orbit the earth if you stand

outside in a parking lot all night it

does in fact look as though all those

objects move across the sky we know now

that that's caused by the Turning of the

Earth but apparent Common Sense might

tell you otherwise

in addition if you live anywhere near a

volcanic region or a place where there

are geysers it might indeed seem that

something very hot is at the Earth's

core because something very hot is and

that that something might be held and if

hell is at the center then Heaven

logically would be as far away from that

as you can get so internally this is a

system that is very strong even if it is

scientifically in error

another aspect of the medieval few of

you of things has to do with What's

called the Great chain of being

now you know if you take a science class

now a biology class or a chemistry class

or what have you that scientists

classify things they they put them into

what we call taxonomies so that for

example you talk of life in terms of

species and genus and family and Order

and what have you we talk of chemicals

in terms of the types of atoms and

molecules that make them up well there

was a different sort of taxonomy for

science in or what passed for science in

the Middle Ages and this is based on the

notion that every single thing in the

universe forms a part of What's called

the Great chain of being ranging from

the lowliest inanimate object at the

bottom to God at the very highest

furthermore it was believed that

everything has its proper place in the

great chain of being and that to get out

of your place is to violate the will of

God this is one reason why in the Middle

Ages rebellion was considered to be such

a horrifying offense for a person to

Rebel to try to rise above his normal

social standing was in this way of

thinking to violate the will of God

now the hierarchical principle comes

into this in a very big way so let's

look at how this works out if we start

at the lowest level of the great chain

of being we start with inanimate objects

rocks minerals and what have you now if

you think in those terms even today we

tend to see inanimate objects in a

hierarchy if for example you're a guy

and you show up at your girlfriend's

door on Valentine's Day with something

made of gold you'll probably get a

better reception than if you so show up

with something made of ten why is that

we have this hierarchy of values that

says that gold is worth more than 10

even though both of them are very useful

Metals in their own right that goes back

to this notion that there is a chain of

being in which gold is a more pure metal

than tin or copper or what have you

now of course inanimate objects are

things that have no life no sensation

and no intelligence that's why they're

at the bottom of the the the whole chain

next up from that we have plant life

and plant life of course does have life

but no sensation at least not as the

Middle Ages saw it and no intelligence

plants too are arranged in a hierarchy

of Purity again to use my previous

example if you show up on Valentine's

Day with roses you'll get a better

reception than with daisies both make me

sneeze they probably do the same thing

to you but the fact is somewhere along

the line the rose came to be seen as a

more pure flower than the daisy or some

others we do the same things with other

forms of plant light we talk about the

noble Oak nobody ever talks about the

noble sycamore tree

so all of these things are in a

hierarchy of value as well

when we move to animal life uh life that

or two to animals have life they have

sensation and at least according to the

Middle Ages they they don't have

intelligence although anybody who's ever

owned a pet knows better than that

nonetheless animals come in a hierarchy

as well

uh they are seen as having different

value that is why the lion is the king

of the jungle the possum never gets to

be the King of Anything

then of course there come humans and we

already know that humans are arranged in

a hierarchy in the Middle Ages ranging

from Surfs at the bottom of society to

Kings and Emperors and popes at the top

and everybody has his appropriate place

now next up for man who has life

sensation and intelligence come the

Angels who have life sensation

intelligence and or without sin and who

do not die they too are arranged in a

hierarchy they're believed to be nine

different categories of angels and

paralleling them in Hell nine different

categories of Fallen Angels or demons

and of course at the top of the

hierarchy is God

now modern science doesn't operate this

way modern science categorizes life and

objects and what have you in a different

way from this but again this has an

internal consistency that fits very well

with the other things we've been talking

about and it's hard to break down initially

initially

mankind of course has has long been

broken down in that way and it is simply

applied to everything else as well

now if we turn to human physiology

human physiology was based in the Middle

Ages on the teachings of the ancient

medical practitioner Galen who was the

be-all and end all authority and what

Galen uh taught based on the teachings

of the still earlier Greek thinker

Hippocrates was that the human body is

made up of four substances called humors

Each of which has certain

characteristics associated with it and

an imbalance of which will cause you to

become ill

Hippocratic or galenic physiology taught

that the humors are transmitted through

the veins from the liver to the heart

and if they get out of balance then

you're in trouble well what are they the

four humors are blood

phlegm what's called yellow bile or

Melancholy and black bile or Kohler and

the thinking is if these are in Balance

you're healthy if they're out of balance

you're not

now another factor that can affect your

health and we'll look at some of the

implications of this in just a minute is

the elements

the elements as they existed in the

Middle Ages were not the elements you

encounter on a periodic chart in your

chemistry class these days they were

four things that in fact aren't elements

at all Earth

water air and fire and again these

appear in a hierarchy of ascending

Purity where do you find Earth well

usually under your feet

Earth is not particularly pure if you

get Earth on your hands you wash it off

before you eat what do you wash it off

with water which is considered to be

more pure than Earth and is found higher

farther from Hell closer to Heaven than

Earth is

above the water you find the air which

at least in the Middle Ages was more

pure maybe maybe not now and finally the

most noble of the elements was thought

to be fire and where one normally finds

fire is in the air so the elements the

humors both are believed to impact upon

your health

there's some other factors that fit into

this as well

there are the related properties of

coldness which is associated with Earth

wetness which not surprisingly is

associated with water

hotness or heat which is associated with

air and dryness which is associated with fire

fire

and all these things are believed to interact

interact

to affect your mental and physical

health possibly also influenced by the

stars and the planets and the Sun and

the Moon

now suppose that this is the case well

galinic medicine medicine based on the

teachings of Galen argues that if you

are ill it is probably because of an

imbalance in your humors that is

affected to some extent by these other

elements like heat and cold dry and wet

and so on

so what do you do

well suppose you cut somebody open and

don't try this at home this is a

hypothetical Point what do you see the

most of First Blood

so the Assumption made by medieval

Medical Practice is that if your humors

are out of balance you probably have too

much blood

and the cure for that is to get rid of

some of it

this can be accomplished in one of two

peaceful ways one is to have a physician

cut you so that you bleed for a while

of course you have to be careful with

this or the Cure becomes worse than the

disease the other other method is to use leeches

leeches

either way the idea is if you remove

some of the blood it will make you well

now this also has a kind of

self-fulfilling internal logic about it

if you bleed someone it will probably

make that person feel a little

light-headed which may actually feel

good for a short time

the other thing is this suppose you

bleed someone and he gets better

well that proves it works right suppose

you bleed someone and he doesn't get

better what's the answer you didn't get

to him in time basically the same answer

you get from the medical community today

now besides bleeding there is another

approach that is taken to restoring the

balance of various factors in uh

in human health

if you've ever had a cold and I know you

all have you know that one is so one of

the things associated with a cold is

moisture a runny nose sweating and all

of that sort of stuff so in the Middle

Ages apparent Common Sense said that if

you're ill you probably have too much

moisture too much of that wet element

that we associate with water

well what to do about that there is also

a treatment for that called cupping

and I most assuredly do not recommend

this to anybody but the way this worked

is it was designed to get moisture out

of your body

so what a physician or a practitioner

would do is take cups and heat them up

and then place them on the bare skin of

the patient

now this course Burns

it creates a blister

now if you open up a blister what do you

find inside of it moisture right so

apparently what cupping is doing is it's

drawing excess moisture out of the body

which supposedly will make you better if

you get better proves it worked right if

you don't get better then didn't get to

you in time so both bloodletting and

cupping were regular features of medical

practice it's a wonder in a way that

anybody survived this

another important feature in the

treatment of physical illness in this

period came from those people who are

known as apothecaries who were the

Medieval equivalent of Pharmacists

apothecaries actually did produce some

medications that had some utility

medications made from herbs and from

various plants and roots and what have

you now they weren't as prolific as the

millions of herbs that you can buy today

many of which have little practical

utility but some of them actually did

serve a real medical purpose

but alongside that apothecaries also

manufactured an awful lot of medicine

that really had very little to do with

dealing with either symptoms or cause of disease

disease

a lot of the medicine made towards the

end of the Middle Ages consisted very

largely of spices which were expensive

and wine

so a big part of the medicine you might

take for something would be spices and

wine which meant that it tasted pretty

good and it probably made you feel

better for a while

if you've got better that meant it

worked if you didn't just didn't get to

you in time but the the main application

of that uh what was was not really all

that beneficial except to the

pocketbooks of those who imported wine

and spices at the time

another interesting feature of Medical

Practice in the Middle Ages is that

Physicians those people who went to a

university and earned a degree in

medicine did not actually do much in the

way of practice they did no Hands-On

work at all in fact in medical school if

you want to call it that for this time

they learn very little about human

anatomy and physiology very little about

pharmacology what they learned was a

fairly standard curriculum where they

learned how to debate where they learned

the art of rhetoric where they learned

grammar and what have you but little

practical medicine

much of the actual practical medicine

was carried out by individuals known as

Barber surgeons

surgery was not done by physicians they

didn't get their hands dirty surgery was

done by Barber surgeons

who often got a lot of their experience

on the battlefield where limbs had to be

amputated or wounds had to be sewed up

or bones had to be set

one of the reasons why a barber poll

even today has red on it is from the

blood associated with the barber

surgeon's practice now we don't

typically think of barbers

as surgeons

but remember the Middle Ages has a

different set of taxonomies than we do

and they do have a certain logic even if

they don't make any sense in terms of

modern science think about what a barber does

does

a barber performs an amputation he

amputates part of your hair so in the

eyes of medieval people removing part of

your hair or removing an injured finger

didn't seem all that terribly different

in fact when it came to performing

simple surgery and healing wounds Barber

surgeons were much better at it than

Physicians but they were held in rather

low esteem because they were mere

Craftsmen whereas Physicians were

considered to be more educated

a couple of the things that barber

surgeons had to guide them in what they

do are a couple of Fairly grotesque

images that survive from the later

Middle Ages one of these is a diagram

showing you various places that you

could do bloodletting on somebody to

cure different sorts of problems another

is a figure called the wound man which

shows some poor imaginary guy with

virtually every wound you can imagine

knives and arrows and what have you

sticking out of him all over and these

were used as guides for showing Barber

surgeons how to function

now if we move from medicine and biology

to chemistry

what we discover is that there is no

chemistry properly speaking in the

Middle Ages with the exception of metallurgy

metallurgy

humans had been making things out of

metals for thousands of years by the

time we get to the late Middle Ages but

more proper chemistry really grew out of

a pseudoscience known as Alchemy almost

everyone has heard of alchemy but very

few people know the full range of what

it covers what most people know about

alchemy is that one of its goals was to transmute

transmute

simple metals are are unvaluable metals

into precious metals most famously

Alchemists were looking for a formula to

to transform lead of which there's a lot

into gold which is rare and very

valuable and of course if anybody really

knew how to do that we probably all

would be doing it but this is not the

only thing that Alchemists did Alchemist

had a whole theory of alchemy which

involved the transmutation of various

things not just lead to Gold but other

things as well

and one of the things that they were

interested in doing was trying to

prolong human life by the transmutation

of life if you will

one of the things they sought to do was

to create what they called aqua Vida or

the Water of Life

and they did this by an increasingly

sophisticated process of distillation

now they didn't produce anything in this

way that made people live longer or live forever

forever

what they did sort of accidentally produce

produce

was vodka and whiskey

and rum and so on any distilled liquor

that could be made using the same

distillation process that Alchemists

invented trying to produce the Water of

Life or aquavita moreover Modern

Chemistry still uses the distillation

process for all sorts of things so we

have a pseudoscience Alchemy creating a

lot of the equipment that is later used

by a real science chemistry down the road

road

and of course as anybody who is a fan of

Harry Potter knows one of the things

that Alchemist did was to look for

something called the Philosopher's Stone

this is not an idea that JK Rowling

invented it's an idea that's been around

for thousands of years and the idea was

that the Philosopher's Stone if it could

be created or found would give you uh

immortality it would allow you to live

forever and so one of the things that

Alchemists try to do with their

experiments with distillation and

transmutation and what have you is to

create that

they did not succeed but again in the

process they discovered a lot of things

sort of by accident and created a lot of

equipment for other purposes that real

science uses later on

by the way there was an alchemist named

Nicholas Flamel he was a real person

that that does not mean that Dumbledore

was a real person but he was a real late

medieval Alchemist and astrologer who

spent a great deal of time trying to

find the Philosopher's Stone

that brings us as a matter of fact to

the whole study of astrology

now as astrology is a system of thought

predicated on the notion that human life

is impacted by the movements of the

Stars the planets the Sun the moon the

placement of the constellations and what

have you

so that for example it's important when

you are born

where the sun and the moon are in

relation to the constellations whether

there is a comet in the sky whether

there are meteor showers whether there

is a Nova that is visible in the sky all

of these things are believed to predict

things about your life

now astrology has largely been reduced

in modern times to you know the columns

that you find in the back of the

newspaper somewhere that will give you

your horoscope tell you that you're

going to meet somebody uh tall dark and

handsome and inherit a lot of money uh

which I'm still waiting to happen in my

case but

astrology even though it's not real

science even though it is a

pseudoscience was an extraordinarily

sophisticated system that sought to

relate all the different movements of

heavenly bodies to human Affairs to

human health and what have you it

Associated different planets with

different elements or different Metals

it Associated different constellations

with different temperaments even as as

the modern day horoscope still does it

did a whole lot more than provide simply

a pickup line like what's your sign it

was a very very sophisticated system and

indeed many of the early scientists of

the first Scientific Revolution were

also practitioners of astrology

we have left astrology behind as a

science but it was thought of one at the

time and although it was not a true

science it did as a matter of fact give

rise to an awful lot of observation of

the heavens and the recording of a great

deal of data which has become the basis

for the science of astronomy much more recently

recently

now there are a number of figures early

on in the history of science who begin

to change some of this

but who also exemplify the fact that

with the Scientific Revolution as with

so many things people often have one

foot in the future and one foot in the past

past

for example there was a medical

practitioner by the name of paracelsus

who lived in the early 16th century who

used minerals for healing in a way that

we still do today

who opposed galens and Hippocrates ideas

about the humans of the humors rather

but who in many respects still believed

in astrology still believed in Magic and

what have you

another of the important early figures

although not much of one when it comes

to advancing science was gerolimo

cardenio a kind of systematizer of astrology

astrology

who didn't deliberately do what we think

of as astronomy but who nonetheless

produced a great deal of information

that astronomers use

uh one of his contemporaries was the

Englishman John D who has featured in a

number of the movies made in recent

years about Queen Elizabeth he was in

fact Queen Elizabeth's magician and her

astrologer she believed firmly in both

things but he also was a great uh source

of policy making he was one of the

leading Naval policy makers at her court

and he in fact owned the largest library

in the world at the peak of his

influence indeed his library is the

basis for the modern day British library

and D is a good example of somebody who

still practice astrology still believed

in Magic but also was making steps

forward in other ways

now before we look look at some more

profoundly influential scientific theory

uh theoreticians who really do begin to

move us into new territory there's a

couple of other elements that we need to add

add

one of these is the widespread belief in

the late Middle Ages in witches

uh it's a mistake that a lot of people

make to assume that the witch craze

lasted all through the Middle Ages that

in fact is not true there were

occasional concerns about witchcraft in

the Middle Ages the odd person here and

there Arrested and charged with

practicing witchcraft but the real witch

craze occurred primarily between about

1450 and about 1650 over a period of

about 200 years and it actually owes

something to the Renaissance As the

Renaissance discovered a great deal

about the ancient world one of the

things that it discovered was ancient

philosophical treatises that attempted

to explain the belief in witchcraft in a

quote-unquote scientific way

and again if we no longer believe in

witches except as something interesting

to dress up as on Halloween there was

nonetheless a very systematic body of

quote unquote knowledge about witches at

the end of the Middle Ages for example

uh in in most cases particularly on the

European continent witchcraft was

associated with what we called diabolism

the that is the idea that the witch had

made a deal with the devil in order to

get access to Supernatural power there

was a belief in What's called the

maleficium that is a witch you had the

maleficium had the ability to do evil

things to other people

it was thought that various animals were

familiars that is that they transmitted

information back and forth between

witches and the devil the most common of

course being black cats black dogs or

black goats although other things were

believed to be familiars as well

and there was even a belief in something

called The Devil's Mark uh which was

thought to be something that looked sort

of like a wart or a mole or a nipple

that the devil's familiar might come and

suck blood from as a way of nourishing

uh evil power

this in fact was thought to be

extraordinarily cold and if you'll

pardon the slight profanity here this is

where we get the modern expression cold

as a witch's tit this didn't refer to an

actual breast but to a growth that was

thought to be a place where a familiar

came and sucked blood

in the late Middle Ages everybody also

believed in Magic I don't believe mean

magic in the sense of pulling a rabbit

out of a hat but magic in the terms of

the ability to harness Supernatural

power for human purposes

uh this this could take all sorts of

forms it might be magical spells it

might be magical formulas uh it might

involve going through some sort of

ritual but all were believed to that

bring about the application of

Supernatural power now here's the thing

almost every early scientist was also a magician

magician

science is something that people

stumbled on in a lot of ways trying to

do magic trying to prevent witchcraft

trying to perform Alchemy and what have you

you

um if you think about it if you took

most of the technology that we have

today and showed it to somebody from the

later Middle Ages what would it look

like to them Magic

Magic

and so science grows out of this and as

time goes on scientific explanations

replace the old superstitious or

Supernatural explanations as time goes on

now of course the Renaissance feeds into

this with the recovery of ancient

science and by the breakdown of people's

tendency to think only in terms of the

way things always have been the age of

Discovery does that as well by opening

up European access to Far Eastern

cultures and the new world

one of the biggest factors in bringing

on the Scientific Revolution is in fact

the Reformation

because after the Reformation there is

no longer a single Church there is no

longer a single theological truth there

are State churches in the various

countries of Europe and by and large in

the early days of the Scientific

Revolution scientists tended to make

more Headway in Protestant States than

they did in Catholic States there's a

good reason for that it's not that

Catholics were any more anti-scientific

than Protestants but Catholics were

invested in the old View

the Catholic church had been around for

hundreds of years it had Incorporated

all the old view into its teaching and

the Catholic church had been attacked by

the Renaissance by the Reformation

feeling a little sensitive and therefore

more resistant to science than

Protestant states which had a relatively

new faith and very little invested in

the past

nevertheless the first person usually

recognized as a founding father of the

first Scientific Revolution was in fact

a Polish Roman Catholic priest by the

name of Nicholas Copernicus who lived in

the late 15th and early 16th centuries

besides being a priest Copernicus had a hobby

hobby

that became kind of an obsession with

him and that was observing the movements

of the various celestial objects

and over time he began to accumulate

enough information to begin formulating

an alternate Theory to explain the

movements of heavenly bodies

he came up with what Aristophanes had

come up with a couple of Millennia

earlier the heliocentric theory the idea

that the Earth orbits the sun rather

than the other way around and that what

creates the appearance of the Earth

being at the center of the universe is

the fact that it turns on its axis

he explained this in a book called on

the Revelation on the Revolutions of the

celestial spheres which was published in

the year of his death 1543.

it of course was greeted with skepticism

by many people since it seemed to

contradict a parent common sense and

also because it went against the

teachings of his own church but it did

begin to trickle out to other thinkers

and to influence the thinking of many people

people

of course this is often the the whole

first scientific revolution is often a

step forward a step back or a step

forward and two steps back so it doesn't

flow smoothly the next major figure I

want to mention is a Dane a Danish

nobleman by the name of Tycho brahe who

lived in the second half of the 16th century

century

and who really took astronomy about as

far as you can go with the naked eye he

became very obsessed with the Stars in

the planets and what have you partly

because of an interest in astrology but

currently because of a daunting

realization that there was more to this

than just old astrological superstition

uh he was credited with discovering a

Nova in 1572 a new star as it was called

and that gained him a great deal of Fame

subsequently he set up on a little

island called iranaborg off the Danish

Coast a kind of Observatory that was

funded by the king Frederick II

and there he and his assistants managed

to record an extraordinary amount of

information about the movements of

celestial bodies pretty much everything

you could see with the naked eye

later on he became the Imperial

astronomer to Emperor Rudolph II one of

the more eccentric figures of the early

modern period but for all the knowledge

that he acquired Tycho brahe continued

to cling to the old geocentric system

what was needed was somebody to take

copernicus's new system and Tycho

braje's data and put them together and

that person turned out to be a German

Lutheran astronomer by the name of

Johannes Kepler who was at one point an

assistant to Tycho brahay and who also

was a mathematician and who also

interestingly enough practiced astrology

he succeeded Tycho brahe as the

astronomer of the Holy Roman Emperor

Rudolph II and he went on to accomplish

some pretty substantial things

now just to show you that we're in a

period of real transition here while Ty

while Johannes Kepler was doing all of

this his mother actually was being

prosecuted as a suspected witch she got

off but the fact that one of the great

figures of the Scientific Revolution

could have a mother being prosecuted as

a witch tells you that we're in a very

transitional phase

Kepler did a fair amount of work with

what we nowadays call inertia but the

most important thing he did was to come

up with something called the laws of

planetary motion

assuming that Copernicus was right

that the planets and the Earth all

circled or all orbited the Sun

he began to work out a mathematical

formula that described those movements

and what he discovered is that of the

known planets and and at this time it

was several of a couple of the planets

Neptune and Pluto were unknown because

you can't see them with the naked eye

the known planets all had orbits that

could be described by the same

mathematical formula

and this is a big thing

not just for astronomers but for the

whole Scientific Revolution because what

it suggests is that there is such a

thing as scientific law here is a law

that explains the movement of all planets

planets

that makes the movement of planets

understandable and begins to suggest

that perhaps there are other laws that

can be discovered as well

one of Kepler's contemporaries he did

most of his work in the early 17th

century was an Italian Catholic

astronomer by the name of Galileo

Galilei are usually just known as

Galileo that's what happens when you're

really famous

one of the things that he did was to

develop an improved telescope

a telescope that was good enough to

allow him to see the mountains on the

moon for example which didn't look any

more pure than the geology of the Earth

it allowed him to see that the planet

Venus has phases which doesn't fit into

the old geocentric theory

perhaps most shockingly he discovered

that Jupiter has moons and that Saturn

has rings

and that brings up a very basic problem

if the planets are set in concentric spheres

spheres

how do the moons get through them

this got Galileo in a lot of trouble

he published the results of his findings

and was heavily criticized by the church

some of his opponents suggested that the

telescope was an instrument of the devil

and that he was being mislaid there

misled thereby but he he stuck to his

guns another thing that he worked on was

falling bodies and he discovered the the

law of falling bodies which is that

anybody no matter its weight its mass or

whatever will reach a maximum speed if

it falls

indeed he came very close to discovering

the law of gravity although not quite

he also did work on inertia he also

studied the moon's effect on the tides

he was a true scientific genius and he

got into a great deal of trouble

uh a lot of this trouble had more to do

with Italian politics and Italian Church

politics than it did with an innate

Catholic hostility to science because

let's remember that Galileo and most of

his Italian supporters were Catholics

too but he antagonized the Jesuits and

that was never a good idea and he spent

the latter part of his life under house

arrest being watched very closely by the Inquisition

Inquisition

as I said earlier Protestant countries

could be safer places for scientists

England is a good example of that there

Francis Bacon an important man is a

politician as well as a scientist came

up with what we call the inductive or

empirical method of doing science which

is a method of science still very much

used today that's based on repeated

experiments or repeated observations

that goes from looking at particular

experiments or particular observations

to drawing more General conclusions

on the flip side over in the Netherlands

a a French expatriate philosopher named

Renee Descartes came up with what we

called the deductive method that is one

that starts with essentially just an

idea and looks for evidence to back it

up or to contradict it he is associated

with the famous phrase kajito ergo-sum I

think therefore I am which literally

meant that he knew he existed because he

was thinking and then he works out from

another important figure in this period

was the anatomist Andreas vasalius who

began practicing dissection and

discovered the function of internal

organs that was important for

contradicting hypocrisy or contradicting

Hippocrates in Galen there was William

Gilbert the English scientist who

discovered magnetism a a force that

we're still pondering on today

William Harvey an English scientist who

discovered the circulation of the blood

from the heart to the arteries to the

veins and therefore was the first person

to really understand how that worked

the Dutchman Anton Von lunick who

invented the first microscope and saw

the first microorganisms although he

failed to really understand why they

were significant

and Robert Boyle an English Alchemist

who became again sort of accidentally

the first modern chemist discovering

among other things Boyle's Law which

says that for a fixed amount of gas at a

fixed temperature pressure and volume

are inversely proportional in other

words if you heat up a closed container

the gas inside it will expand

he also discarded the whole notion of

the four elements

but of course the giant of the first

Scientific Revolution the man who is to

the first Scientific Revolution what

Albert Einstein is to the second

Scientific Revolution was Isaac Newton

an English scientist who did all sorts

of work

he is known for example for his work

with Optics that is studying the

behavior of light using lenses and

prisms one of the things that's truly

stunning about Newton is that he was

working at Cambridge One Summer doing

work on Optics and was was forced to go

home for a while because of an outbreak

of the plague he was having difficulty

uh mathematically expressing what he was

Finding so he took a few weeks off and

essentially invented calculus

but more impressive is that over time

Newton began to pull together all of the

discoveries of his predecessors and to

discover a number of what he saw as

universal laws

it was Newton that discovered the law of gravity

gravity

it was Newton who discovered various

Laws of Motion like for example that

which says that for every action there

is an equal and opposite reaction and in

1687 he published his findings in a book

called principia that becomes one of the

most influential pieces of work in the

history of science it revolutionized

science because it led people who read

it and understood it to begin to see the

universe not as a disordered mysterious

place that could not be explained but as

a place that functioned according to

unchanging inflexible natural laws

natural laws that could be understood

once they were discovered

even Newton of course was a man who had

a foot in the past as well as a foot in

the future

he was an alchemist along with

everything else and he became obsessed

later in life with trying to date every

single event in the Bible which is a

fundamentally impossible task

now during Newton's lifetime in Britain

something occurred which showed that

science had ceased to be something

suspect something bordering on heresy uh

something that you could be prosecuted

for to something quite acceptable and

that was the foundation in Britain in

1662 of the Royal Society the first

scientific society that was in founded

by the was founded by the king himself

Charles II

in fact these Royal societies like the

Royal Society took a bigger role in the

advancement of science than the

universities which at the time were

somewhat backward a similar one was

founded in France in 1666 by Louis XIV

Minister Colbert and known as The

Academy of Science

well finally what this leaves us with is

is a couple of very profound Notions at

the end of the first Scientific Revolution

Revolution

uh one is the this notion of the

universe as a an orderly place as a

place with inflexible unchanging laws as

almost a machine

and it begins to affect the way that

people think about God as well

if God created the universe and if the

universe is this orderly place which has

all of these laws then God is the author

of scientific law

and if God has ordained these scientific

laws then it stands to reason that he

will not interfere with them

so a popular image by the beginning of

the 18th century and one that we'll

encounter again in discussions of the

Enlightenment is the idea of God as the

great clock maker God who built the

universe which operates with all the

efficiency and the regularity of a clock

who wound it up so to speak and who

allows it to run

how do we know this well the scientists

of the first Scientific Revolution say we know it by the application of human

we know it by the application of human reason and that notion that the universe

reason and that notion that the universe is an understandable place if you simply

is an understandable place if you simply apply human reason will become the basis

apply human reason will become the basis for the enlightenment of the 18th

for the enlightenment of the 18th century

century all right very interesting first

all right very interesting first Scientific Revolution all right well

Scientific Revolution all right well that actually sets us up for our next

that actually sets us up for our next lecture the enlightenment also known as

lecture the enlightenment also known as The Age of Reason Just think reason you

The Age of Reason Just think reason you can't have reason if you don't have a

can't have reason if you don't have a scientific way of explaining things in

scientific way of explaining things in the universe you know it all goes hand

the universe you know it all goes hand in hand so the Scientific Revolution of

in hand so the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century setting up in some of

the 17th century setting up in some of the 18th

the 18th is setting up

is setting up the enlightenment of the 18th century or

the enlightenment of the 18th century or the Age of Reason where people are

the Age of Reason where people are saying the universe can be understood

saying the universe can be understood that it can be governed by natural not

that it can be governed by natural not Supernatural resources the Age of Reason

Supernatural resources the Age of Reason use it uses this reason for politics and

use it uses this reason for politics and religion the scientific method could

religion the scientific method could answer all questions and the human race

answer all questions and the human race could be educated and improved

could be educated and improved Enlightenment until next time

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HIST 102 #16 - The First Scientific Revolution