1 1543 - 1687 University system as center of orthodoxy Authority of ◦ Plato (Timaeus) ◦ Aristotle (the Organum) ◦ The Church “The LORD is king, robed with majesty; the LORD is robed, girded with might. The world will surely stand in place, never to be moved.” [Psalms 93:1] “The LORD is king. The world will surely stand fast, never to be moved. God rules the peoples with fairness.” [Psalms 96: 10] “You fixed the earth on its foundation, never to be moved.” [Psalms 104: 5] “Tremble before him, all the earth; he has made the world firm, not to be moved.” (1 Chronicles 16: 30] “Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”
Transcript
1
1543 - 1687
University system as center of orthodoxy
Authority of
◦ Plato (Timaeus)
◦ Aristotle (the Organum)
◦ The Church
“The LORD is king, robed with majesty; the LORD is robed, girded with might. The world will surely stand in place, never to be moved.” [Psalms 93:1]
“The LORD is king. The world will surely stand fast, never to be moved. God rules the peoples with fairness.” [Psalms 96: 10]
“You fixed the earth on its foundation, never to be moved.” [Psalms 104: 5]
“Tremble before him, all the earth; he has made the world firm, not to be moved.” (1 Chronicles 16: 30]
“Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”
2
Sphere Composition
Celestial Immutable Quintessence
Terrestrial Mutable Four Sub-lunar Elements
3
Polish astronomer and
astrologer
On the revolutions of the
celestial spheres, 1543
Proposed motion of the
Earth and fixity of the Sun.
Immovable sphere of fixed stars
Mobileplanetary spheres
4
“Mathematics is for mathematicians”
“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here”
Owen Gingerich has called this “the book no body read.”
No immediate change in astronomical theory or practiceand only began to have an influence ~75 after publication.
Then, Copernicus’ ideas were rapidly overtaken by those of Kepler.
The “revolution” is an invention of historians in the late 18th
Century and continued by Kuhn and others.
“Had it not been for the contribution of TychoBrahe and [Johannes] Kepler, the Copernican system would have contributed to the perpetuation of the Ptolemaic system in a slightly more complicated form but more pleasing to philosophical minds” (O. Neugebauer, 1968, p. 103)
“If there was a revolution in astronomy, that revolution was Keplerian and Newtonian, and not in any simple or valid sense Copernican” (I.B. Cohen, 1985, p. 125)
First scientific institute
New instruments
New tables of atmospheric refraction
New observational protocols
Continual observation of planets
5
German astronomer, mathematician & astrologer.
Assisted Brahe and inherited his data
Astronomia Nova, 1609
Three laws of planetary motion
Largely a revolution on paper only.
6
1609 – Kepler’s New Astronomy 1610 – Galileo’s Starry Messenger 1618 – Beginning of Thirty Year War 1620 – Bacon’s Novum Organon 1638 – Galileo’s Two New Sciences 1642 – English Civil War 1660 – Foundation of the Royal Society 1666 – Great Plague (and Fire) of London 1667 – Great Turkish War (until 1699) 1687 – Newton’s Principia 1688 – The “Glorious Revolution”
Scientific methods (Rene Descartes & Bacon)
Experimentation & Observation
Instrumentalist view of natural philosophy
Networks of inquiry
Democratization of knowledge
English politician and philosopher
Novum Organum, 1620
Experimentally-based induction as a method for attaining knowledge
The importance of the “negative instances” and “crucial instances.”
Communal nature of inquiry
7
Robert Boyle,
Anglo-Irish natural
philosopher and
alchemist.
8
English experimental philosopher
Curator of Experiments for the RSL.
Micrographia, 1665
Hooke’s Law, 1676
9
10
“As the extension, so the force.”
Writing in Italian and hugely influencing the natural philosophy of his day
◦ Letters on Sunspots, 1613
◦ Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632
◦ Discourse on the Two New Sciences, 1638
Ideas used by Hooke, Newton, Huygens …
11
12
The Medician Satellites
13
14
Saturn
“[Natural] Philosophy is written in this grand book - the universe - which stands continuously open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”
15
Isaac Newton 1687
Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 2005.
Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 2005
