AdamHWeek4

The Scientific Revolution is a varying time period which started as people learned to “accept nothing on the basis of words (or someone else’s authority).” The period has many different start and end points, some say it started with Copernicus, some say with Newton. In any point it started with the first major case of a new discovery contradicting the traditional thinking. It’s much easier to define the revolution by splitting it up into many different ones, such as: The Galilean Revolution, Copernican Revolution, or Newtonian Synthesis. England in the 17th Century was very turbulent with power struggles and revolutions all over. These revolutions took the country, politically, from a constitutional monarchy to an absolute monarchy and then back. In the process, Parliament got more power, the monarch got less, and citizens got more rights. These were accomplished through the Petition of Rights, Militia Ordinance, and the Bill of Rights. Most citizens gained freedom of religion and no longer had to belong to the Church of England. England became the main country in Great Britain after the King of Scotland became the King of England. Robert Boyle is most known as the Boyle of Boyle’s Law of Gases. In fact that’s all most people know of the man. Boyle was born into a wealthy family and as a result had an excellent education. He began writing once he was done school but in 1649 started a lab in his home. Boyle began his studies into chemistry and alchemy once it was complete. He moved to Oxford in 1655 and formed a group with other like minded people which led to the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. Boyle wrote extensively on the relationship between science and religion. He believed strongly and Christianity and thought that it and science could coexist peacefully. Boyle also defended Christianity from Atheists. He was an expert at designing experiments to give large amounts of precise data on the subject. Boyle “was important for his theoretical exposition of experimentation.” Along with his assistant Hooke, he developed a vacuum that allowed for many different experiments. Boyle didn’t like to make conclusions from the vast data that he collected, which angered some people. Jacob and Jacob declare “that the Scientific Revolution from Boyle to Newton was one of the most important and subtle transformation to come out of the century of revolution.” The century of revolution refers to the political and scientific revolutions that occurred throughout Europe. The Anglican Church was a leading force of the Scientific Revolution. Puritans held that “God was responsible for all motion in the universe.” Anglican “relied upon the new science to verify both God’s order in an unstable world and the superiority of cautious scientific inquiry to the illumination of the spirit.” Newton didn’t really study and mathematics until his second year of college which is remarkable since he developed calculus. Once he got the urge to study mathematics, he had an almost insatiable desire for more learning. It’s interesting that his first subject he taught on was optics which he is not nearly well known for. He theorized and was correct that white light wasn’t one “ray” but rather a combination of multiple ones. Hooke and Newton didn’t really get along after Hooke objected to one of Newton’s papers. After that point, Newton made it his goal to humiliate Hooke and even held a paper off the press until Hooke died. Newton had tried to say that light was made up of particles not waves; this has been proved incorrect since. After Hooke died Newton published a paper on optics which had ideas in it that would only work if light was a wave. He waited for Hooke to die so that Hooke couldn’t say “Told you.” In 1936 papers came to auction that revealed that Newton studied Alchemy. Alchemists had a very negative reputation among scientists because most were trying to change elements into gold. Once Newton was revealed to be one, the social stigma surrounding them retracted slightly because of his high stature.