The Scientific Revolution and the Global Exchange of Knowledge

A new way of knowing

In 1650, most educated Europeans still learned about nature from ancient authorities, such as Aristotle, and from scripture. By 1789, they increasingly trusted observation, experiment and mathematics, checked by other investigators. Historians call this change the Scientific Revolution.

It began earlier, with Copernicus's sun-centred model (1543), Kepler's laws of planetary motion and Galileo's telescope. Between 1650 and 1789 it became organized: societies, academies and journals turned private discoveries into public, testable knowledge. And it was never purely European: knowledge travelled along the same routes as trade and empire.

Newton's synthesis

In 1687 Isaac Newton published the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). He showed that the same laws of motion and the same law of universal gravitation explain a falling apple, the tides, the orbit of the Moon and the paths of the planets. The heavens and the Earth obeyed one set of mathematical laws.

Newton's work was a model for later thinkers: if nature followed rational laws, perhaps society, government and the economy did too. That idea fed the Enlightenment (next lesson).

Other landmarks:

• Robert Boyle's experiments with an air pump led to Boyle's law (1662) relating gas pressure and volume.
• Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) used the word cell; Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in Delft described tiny living things seen through his microscopes in the 1670s.
• Edmond Halley used Newton's laws to predict that a comet would return in 1758. It did, after his death, and now bears his name.
• Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1735) began the system of classifying living things that biologists still use.
• Antoine Lavoisier showed that mass is conserved in chemical reactions and named oxygen; his chemistry textbook appeared in 1789.

Making knowledge public

Scientists began to work in communities. The Royal Society of London was founded in 1660; the Académie royale des sciences in Paris in 1666. In 1665 the first scientific journals appeared, including the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. Members described experiments in detail so others could repeat them. This is the ancestor of today's peer review, which you will meet in every university science course.

Knowledge from around the world

The Scientific Revolution drew on knowledge from many cultures, often without giving credit.

• China. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing served the Qing as astronomers. The Kangxi emperor studied Euclid's geometry with them, and Jesuits reported Chinese knowledge back to Europe.
• India. Jai Singh II, ruler of Amber (Jaipur), built large stone observatories in the 1720s–1730s, including the Jantar Mantar in Delhi and Jaipur, and compiled astronomical tables drawing on Islamic, Hindu and European astronomy.
• The Americas. Andean healers used cinchona bark against fevers; Europeans learned of it and called it "Jesuit's bark". Its active ingredient, quinine, later became a key treatment for malaria. The naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian studied insects in Suriname (published 1705) with help from Indigenous and enslaved African informants.
• The Ottoman Empire, Africa and Asia: inoculation. Smallpox killed or scarred millions. In the Ottoman Empire, parts of Africa, China and India, people practised inoculation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador in Istanbul, described it in a 1717 letter, had her son inoculated there and promoted it in London in 1721. That same year in Boston, an enslaved West African man named Onesimus explained the practice to the minister Cotton Mather, who promoted it during an epidemic.

Science, empire, religion and gender

• Empire. Botanical gardens (such as Kew in London) and expeditions gathered plants of economic value, such as cinchona, tea, sugar and spices. Science and colonial profit were closely linked.
• Religion. Most scientists of the period were religious believers; Newton wrote more about theology than physics. Many saw science as revealing God's design. Conflict between science and religion was real at times but is often exaggerated.
• Gender. Women were mostly excluded from universities and societies, but some found ways in. Émilie du Châtelet translated Newton's Principia into French with her own commentary (published 1759). Laura Bassi became a professor at the University of Bologna in 1732 and later held its chair of experimental physics. Merian funded her own expedition.
• Race. Some naturalists, including Linnaeus, also classified human beings into ranked groups. These ideas were not supported by evidence, but they were later used to justify slavery and colonial rule. Modern genetics shows they are false.