The Scientific View of the World

This is Unit Five of Western Civilization Two, part one of two: the scientific view of the world, the exam's third band. Unit four ended with the Treaty of Paris and a bill sent to Versailles. This unit changes the subject from power to knowledge, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is one change of purpose: for a thousand years natural philosophy described a truth already known, and in a century and a half it learned to discover truths instead. The chain runs from Copernicus's sun in fifteen forty-three through Brahe's data, Kepler's laws and Galileo's telescope to Newton's one law in sixteen eighty-seven, with Bacon writing the rules of induction and Descartes the opposite rules. Three of the exam's sample questions live in this unit, Newton's predecessors and Locke's white paper, and part two works them. By the end you will be able to describe natural philosophy and Bacon's method. To trace the heavens from Ptolemy to the trial. To describe the Principia. To describe medicine and the women admitted. To explain the institutions. And to describe deism, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Hobbes and Locke.

Four entries on what came before and how the new thing worked: describing a known truth, humanism's child, Newton the alchemist, and Bacon's rules.

The answer preceded the question.

WC2 0401 Natural Philosophy: Describing a Truth Already Known

For a thousand years Europeans looked backward, to Aristotle and the ancients on the universe and the body, with Christian scholarship finding God's hand in nature. The point of natural philosophy was to describe a truth already known, not to discover one, so there was no empirical research. Practical effects were small at the time; long-term ones enormous.

Facts to theory, or theory to facts.

WC2 0402 Humanism's Child: Induction, Deduction, and Mathematics as a Divine Language

The revolution grew from Renaissance humanism, which showed that ancients had disagreed with Aristotle, so fundamentals could be questioned. Inductive reasoning moves from facts to theory; deductive from theory to fit the facts, geocentrism the classic case. Mathematics promised certainty as a divine language, and astronomy came first because the planets defied the ancients. Deduction stayed part of real science.

The laws of motion and the philosopher's stone.

WC2 0403 Magic and Science Together: Newton the Alchemist

Modern objectivity came later. Newton spent years on alchemy trying to transmute lead; astronomers cast horoscopes; magical formulas attributed to Hermes Trismegistus circulated among the learned. The urge to probe secrets, the anchor says, still produced discovery. They were scientists and magicians at once.

A prophet, not a practitioner.

WC2 0404 Bacon's Method: Hypothesis, Disproof, Repetition

Francis Bacon, who died in sixteen twenty-six, codified the method: form a hypothesis, then try to disprove it, and trust only results that repeat. He broke with ancient authority entirely, calling it all but worthless; the witness names the Novum Organum of sixteen twenty. Bacon is induction; Descartes, later in this part, is deduction.

Five entries on the heavens: Ptolemy's spheres, the canon who moved the sun, the data that proved him, the telescope, and the trial.

Eighty spheres, and a theory the facts were bent to fit.

WC2 0405 Ptolemy's Spheres and Why Geocentrism Fit Theology

Ptolemy and Aristotle put the earth at the center inside crystal spheres, close to eighty by the anchor's count. Christianity fitted it: a changing, imperfect earth, perfect heavens, God beyond the last sphere and hell within. The planets' paths kept breaking the model, so it grew ever more caveats. Geocentrism was deduction, a theory the observations were bent to fit.

Published as he died.

WC2 0406 Copernicus, 1543: The Sun at the Center

Copernicus, a Polish canon, put the sun at the center in a book published as he died in fifteen forty-three, keeping the spheres and Ptolemy's calculations. The witness cites On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres as the revolution's usual starting point. The anchor calls him a priest; canon is the witness's and the record's word.

Data gathered to refute, used to prove.

WC2 0407 Brahe's Data and Kepler's Sun-Centered Proof

Tycho Brahe spent twenty years gathering data to refute heliocentrism; the data outlived the argument. His assistant Kepler used it to prove the sun central and to derive, the witness says, three laws of planetary motion, sensing a force from the sun. The force was gravity, and Newton named it.

Three assumptions undermined at once.

WC2 0408 Galileo's Telescope and The Starry Messenger, 1610

Galileo built a telescope from a description and saw the moon's craters, the sun's spots and Jupiter's moons, publishing The Starry Messenger in sixteen ten and demonstrating in public. The witness adds the phases of Venus and his claim that nature's laws are mathematical. Imperfect heavens, an uncentered earth, ancients wrong, and the trial followed the third.

Simplicio loses every argument.

WC2 0409 The Dialogue, the Trial of 1633, and Galileo's Physics

The Dialogue of sixteen thirty-two let a character called Simplicio lose every argument, and the pope took it personally. Tried by the Inquisition in thirty-three for supporting a condemned doctrine, not heresy as such, Galileo recanted, and the book stayed on the Index until eighteen twenty-two. Two New Sciences followed: inertia and acceleration in mathematics, refuting Aristotle.

Two entries on the culmination: one law for planets and pebbles, and the man who wrote it.

One law for planets and pebbles.

WC2 0410 Newton's Principia, 1687: One Law for Planets and Pebbles

Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy of sixteen eighty-seven gave one universal law of gravitation for planets and the smallest objects, and all of physics in formulas. Aristotle and Ptolemy became history of thought, not science. The witness states the exam's chain: Kepler and Galileo gave the theory credibility, and the work culminated in the Principia.

Optics, a telescope, and a curmudgeon.

WC2 0411 Newton's Other Work, and the Man

Newton measured the relative mass of earth and water, split light into the spectrum, built a new telescope and wrote optics' founding paper. Cambridge professor at twenty-seven, later knighted, he presided over the Royal Society and published reluctantly. The anchor's portrait, a humorless curmudgeon, is the anchor's; it names the wrong monarch for the knighting, and the course names none.

Four entries on the body and the women: Galen's humors and two dissectors, bacteria seen but unexplained, the women the republic admitted, and how the new science treated them.

The heart pumps, the liver does not.

WC2 0412 Galen's Humors, Vesalius, and Harvey

Medicine lagged: Galen's four humors and bleeding ruled, and cadavers were taboo. Vesalius, a Fleming at Padua, drew anatomy from dissection; Harvey showed the heart pumps blood in circulation, and the microscope found the capillaries that closed his circuit. Print and Renaissance drawing made anatomy shareable. The anchor calls Vesalius Italian; he was Flemish, and humors persisted anyway.

Seeing was not understanding.

WC2 0413 Microscopes, Bacteria, and No Theory of Contagion

With his microscopes Leeuwenhoek observed bacteria in the sixteen seventies and drew no conclusion about disease. Contagion waited two centuries, for Pasteur in the eighteen sixties, where unit twelve picks up the thread. The instrument outran the theory. The anchor says he invented the microscope; he improved it and looked.

Barred by rule, not by law.

WC2 0414 Women in the Republic of Science: Merian, the Lavoisiers, du Châtelet

Aristocratic women worked as collaborators and sometimes as scientists: Maria Sibylla Merian's entomology and South American expedition, the Lavoisiers' joint chemistry in the eighteenth century, and Émilie du Châtelet, whom the witness names among the era's intellectual leaders. Barred from societies and universities by informal rule, not by law. The anchor's quinine countess is a legend historians doubt, and is omitted.

A worse theory than the old one.

WC2 0415 Poulain de la Barre, and How the New Science Reinforced Stereotypes

Poulain de la Barre argued in the sixteen seventies that male dominance was custom and that differences between peoples were cosmetic. The new science went the other way: wider hips as destiny, smaller skulls, midwifery seized by male doctors. A pseudo-scientific theory of sexual difference worse than the old one, in the anchor's analysis, attributed.

Four entries on the institutions: why science moved northwest, two state-funded societies, the republic of correspondents, and the fall of Latin.

Weaker churches, not kinder faiths.

WC2 0416 Why the Center Moved Northwest: Weaker Churches, Not Kinder Faiths

Early work was Catholic and Italian; the center shifted to the Netherlands and England. Not because Protestants were tolerant, the anchor says, but because their institutions were weaker, so a book could be published. France counted too, with kings at arm's length from Rome. Institutional weakness, not doctrine, is the anchor's explanation.

Shipping, ballistics, optics, the military.

WC2 0417 The Royal Society and the Académie: State-Funded, Useful Science

England's Royal Society first met in sixteen sixty and was chartered by Charles the Second; France's Academy of Sciences was founded by Louis the Fourteenth in sixty-six, both dates the witness's. Both funded useful science, shipping, ballistics, optics, the military, a pattern the anchor says continues to this day. The anchor puts both in sixty-two; the witness separates them.

Shoulders of giants.

WC2 0418 The Republic of Science: Journals, Correspondence, Shoulders of Giants

Lectures, letters and repeated experiments bound a republic of science, and the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions was the first journal. Progress became incremental, each result building on the last, standing on the shoulders of giants, and any disciplined person could contribute. The ancients had claimed completeness; incremental progress is the modern habit.

Readers who had never studied Latin.

WC2 0419 From Latin to the Vernaculars

Kepler and Galileo wrote in the vernacular to mark their work off from doctrine; Newton wrote the Principia in Latin and later works in English. Over the eighteenth century Latin declined as the language of learning, and science reached readers who had never studied it. Latin's fall widened the audience that unit six's Enlightenment addressed.

Five entries on the mind and the state: the clockmaker God, Descartes's doubt, Spinoza's God-as-nature and Pascal's wager, Hobbes's contract for order, and Locke's blank slate.

A God who built the clock.

WC2 0420 The Mechanical Universe and Deism

A universe describable in mathematics suggested a God who built the clock and let it run: deism, no intervention, no miracles after creation. At the time it did not undermine belief, the anchor says, though it contradicted passages of scripture. The clockmaker God of the philosophes; deism is not atheism, and unit six keeps them apart.

One certainty, and a God deduced from it.

WC2 0421 Descartes: Doubt, "I Think, Therefore I Am", and a Non-Meddling God

Descartes, who died in sixteen fifty, made doubt his method and found one certainty: I think, therefore I am. From the thinking self he deduced a benevolent, non-meddling God, deduction applied to theology. The witness calls him the first modern rationalist, with Spinoza and Leibniz, against the empiricists Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Descartes deduces, Bacon induces.

Opposite conclusions from one science.

WC2 0422 Spinoza's Materialism and Pascal's Wager

Spinoza, an Amsterdam Jew excommunicated at twenty-four, held nature's laws to be God and a personal God superstition, with no spirit or soul: materialism, near atheism, condemned by every church. Pascal answered doubt with a wager: worship costs nothing if God does not exist. Pascal on law: truth this side of the Pyrenees, error beyond.

A giant king made of his subjects.

WC2 0423 Hobbes: Leviathan and the Contract for Order

The anchor never names Hobbes; the witness does. In Leviathan Hobbes argued that without a powerful sovereign life is anarchic, and that absolute government by contract best preserves order and even rights: people surrender their natural rights to the state for security. The frontispiece shows a giant king made of his subjects. This entry rests on the witness texts, not the anchor.

Consent, toleration, and a mind born blank.

WC2 0424 Locke: Revocable Sovereignty, Toleration, and the Blank Slate

Locke, born in sixteen thirty-two by the witness's date, held that people grant sovereignty to government, revocable when it breaks the law; that toleration follows because no one holds exclusive truth; and that the mind is born a blank slate, so education makes reason. The witness adds life, liberty and property, and government by consent. The anchor's thirty-seven is corrected.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe natural philosophy that described a known truth, the induction and deduction humanism made possible, Newton the alchemist, and Bacon's rules. You can trace the heavens from eighty spheres through Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler, the telescope of sixteen ten, and the trial of thirty-three. You can describe the Principia's one law and the man who wrote it. You can describe Vesalius and Harvey, bacteria seen without a theory, the women admitted, and the stereotypes the new science made worse. You can explain weak churches, two societies, the republic of correspondents, and the vernaculars. And you can describe the clockmaker God, Descartes, Spinoza and Pascal, Hobbes's contract, and Locke's blank slate. Part two works the sample questions, whose work Newton culminated and whose view the white paper is, and asks what the revolution changed.