Science Is Confusing (But Important)

Please ignore the fact that some words are in different size fonts.

The "scientific revolution" occurred during the 1700s.  People had previously focused on religion and used theology to validate their decisions.  During the scientific revolution, people focused more on science and reason, but they didn't abandon religion completely.

The scientific revolution was indeed revolutionary because it changed the world-view (people's outlook on life).

Aristotle’s ideas were accepted for so long because they offered an understandable explanation for what people saw and they fit neatly with Christian doctrines.  It established a home for God and souls and put human beings at the center of the universe, making them the critical link between God and everything else in the “great chain of being”.

spoiler alert: he is.

Ideas began to change during the scientific revolution and scientists started to build their ideas off each other.  The scientific revolution began with the Copernican hypothesis, but it was a gradual change/process.  During this process, science was becoming science was becoming independent of religion and began questioning religion instead of just agreeing with it.

Copernicus and Aristotle had different ideas.  Aristotle's ideas made sense to people and religions, saying that  earth was at the center of the universe, there was a place for God in the universe, and since people were at the center, they were the link between God and everything else in the “great chain of being”.  Copernicus, on the other hand, was condemned by religions because he said the sun was at the center of the universe and the earth was just another planet.  By characterizing earth as just another planet, the basic idea of Aristotelian physics was destroyed and he said the earthly world wasn’t really different from the heavenly world.

Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer whose greatest contribution was his mass of data, but his limited understanding of math prevented him from making sense of his data.  His idea of the universe was  part Ptolemaic, part Copernican.  He believed that all plants revolved around the sun and the entire group of sun and planets revolved around the earth-moon system.

Johannes Kepler furthered Brahe’s work and contributed the 3 laws that govern orbital motion: orbits of planets are elliptical, planets don’t move at uniform speed, and  the time a planet takes to complete its orbit is related to its distance from the sun.

Galileo's greatest achievement was the elaboration and consolidation of the experimental method (conducted controlled experiments to find out what actually happened instead of speculating).  His law of inertia was also important.  It stated that  rest is not the natural state of objects.  Rather, objects are constantly in motion and there are  equal forces pushing against each other (table pushing book up, gravity pushing book down à at rest).  Inertia went against Aristotle’s ideas because Galileo is saying that things are constantly in motion, whereas Aristotle said that a uniform force moved an object at a constant speed and the object would stop as soon as that force was moved.  Galileo was tried for  heresy by the papal Inquisition because he said the sun was at the center of the universe.

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation.  A scientific law is a statement based on repeated experimental observations that describes some aspects of the universe.  A scientific law always applies under the same conditions, and implies that there is a causal relationship involving its elements.  Do laws and theories change when we discover new information?  Do new discoveries make the previous versions of theories and laws false?

How did people apply the methods from the scientific revolution to life and the Enlightenment?  The Enlightenment applies scientific methods to society as a whole.