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Important people associated with the Scientific Revolution

1) Nicholas Copernicus In a book called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (written in 1534 and was published in 1543 as Copernicus lay on his deathbed), Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. Such a model is called a heliocentric system. In this new ordering the Earth is just another planet (the third outward from the Sun), and the Moon is in orbit around the Earth, not the Sun. The stars are distant objects that do not revolve around the Sun. Instead, the Earth is assumed to rotate once in 24 hours, causing the stars to appear to revolve around the Earth in the opposite direction.

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2) Johannes Kepler - studied the orbits of the planets and sought to understand some grand scheme that

defined the structure of the universe according to simple geometry. Though he was unable to do accomplish his goal, he did come up with the laws of planetary motion, which explained the orbital properties of planets, and factored extensively into Isaac Newton's later work.

3) Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Designed telescope that magnified to 30x than that of the naked eye. Saw that moon had mountainous regions like that of the earth, thus Galileo thought that both were composed of similar material. Also got information that posed challenges to the Catholic Church-backed Ptolemy’s theory of Geocentric Solar System. Wrote Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632). He studied physics, specifically the laws of gravity and motion, and invented the telescope and microscope. Galileo eventually combined his laws of physics with the observations hemade with his telescope to defend the heliocentric Copernican view of the universe and disprove the Aristotelian system in his 1630 masterwork, Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World. Upon its

publication, he was censored by the Catholic Church and sentenced to house arrest in 1633, where he remained until his death in 1642





4) Francis Bacon ( 1561- 1626) wasn't a scientist in our sense of the word, but he did take great joy in telling everybody why they were wrong. In particular, he argued that all the old systems of understanding should be abandoned: he called them idols. He believed that knowledge shouldn't be derived from books, but from experience itself. Europeans should move beyond their classics and observe all natural and human phenomena (events) afresh. He proposed that one begins by observing the variety of phenomena and derives general principles to explain those observations. (In deductive thinking, one starts with general principles and

uses these principles to account for the variety of phenomena (events). This model of systematic empirical induction was the piece that completed the puzzle in the European world view and made the scientific revolution possible.



6) Greatest person of the Scientific Revolution? Isaac Newton (1642-1727), put the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo together to explain planetary motion. After the apple hit him across the head, he came up with gravity. Newton understood that gravity was the force of attraction between two objects. He also understood that an object with more matter –mass- exerted the greater force, or pulled smaller object toward it. That meant that the large mass of the earth pulled objects toward it. That is why the apple fell down instead of up, and why people don’t float in the air. Isaac Newton thought that maybe gravity was not just limited to the earth and the objects on it. What if gravity extended to the moon and beyond? Isaac calculated the

force needed to keep the moon moving around the earth. The moon held in an orbit around earth by the pull of earth’s gravity. Isaac Newton’s calculations changed the way people understood the universe. No one had been able to explain why the planets stayed in their orbits. What held them up? Less that 50 years before Isaac Newton was born it was thought that the planets were held in place by an invisible shield. Isaac proved that they were held in place by the sun’s gravity. He also showed that the force of gravity was affected by distance and by mass.



scientific revolution people - weebly · important people associated with the scientific revolution...

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