THE CLASSICAL SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION 1543 1687 Copernicus Newton

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THE CLASSICAL SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION(1543 -
1687)Copernicus Newton
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Pre-Greek Paradigm

• Nature is arbitrary, capricious, mysterious, and
  terrifying.
• The Gods use the forces of nature to punish or
  reward people.
• The sun, moon, and planets are gods.

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16th Century Pre-Copernican Paradigm

• Humans, as Gods special creations, are the
  center of the universe in several ways
• The universe was created by God.
• Earth is the physical center of a mathematically
  planned universe.
• Humans were put on Earth by God. Therefore,
  humans are Gods special creations.
• Humans can learn and understand Gods work
  through faith and reason.
• Humans have been given the precious gift of being
  able to understand the mathematical harmony.

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16th Century Pre-Copernican Paradigm

• Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1277)
• Argued against the notion That all knowledge
  comes from divine illumination.
• At the University of Paris Aquinas was at the
  center of battles over the newly discovered
  Greek knowledge. He won over the faculty.
• Aquinas duality argument that won
• When it came to science, the Greeks, principally
  Aristotle, revealed Gods work.
• When it came to matters of salvation, the Church
  and the scriptures were the revealing authority.

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16th Century Pre-Copernican Paradigm

• The problem was, once the Church accepted this
  duality and Aristotles science, they were
  unwilling to change.
• The Catholic church
• Dominated intellectual activities.
• After Aquinas, the church supported Aristotelian
  science.

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COPERNICUS
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Nicholas Copernicus(1473 - 1543)
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Copernicus Life

• Nicholas Copernicus (Nikolaj Kopernik) was born
  in Torun, Poland on February 19, 1473 of a
  well-to-do merchant family.
• He studied canon law at the University of Krakow
  from 1491 to 1495, and from 1496 to 1503, he
  studied at the Universities of Bologna and Padua.
  
• The University of Krakow, was famous for its
  mathematics and astronomy.
• At the University of Bologna, he advanced his
  theory that the Moon was a satellite of the
  Earth.

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Copernicus Life

• At Padua, he studied medicine.
• He became fascinated by celestial motion and
  observed this phenomena with his naked eye.
• He made astronomical observations using very
  simple wooden instruments with no lenses (lenses
  were not invented until 100 years later). But he
  did not use these observations in developing his
  theory he used the same data that Ptolomy used.
• He then began drawing the positions of the
  constellations and planets to support his
  heliocentric theory.

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Copernicus Life

• About 1515, he earnestly began to compile data
  and he wrote a short report on his theory that he
  circulated among astronomers.
• His theory was finished by 1530, but was first
  published by a Lutheran printer in Nürnberg,
  Germany, just before Copernicus's death in 1543.
• It was named De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
  (The Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres).

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Copernicus Life

• Many historians think Copernicus waited to
  publish out of fear of the Church.
• Although some accounts say he never saw the
  printed work. It is believed he died several
  hours after seeing the printed copy.
• Copernicus took the first major step toward
  putting to an end the belief that the Earth was
  the center of the universe he took the Earth out
  of the center of the Universe.

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An Aside

• The publisher put a note at the beginning of the
  book that said that the theory contained therein
  was not meant to actually model reality, but was
  merely an easier mathematical formulation.
• It is believed by most historians that Copernicus
  did not know about the note, and would not have
  approved.

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Copernicus Model

• De Revolutionibus presented, for the first time,
  a mathematical account of the correct position of
  the Sun among the planets.
• The Sun, said Copernicus, was the center of the
  planetary system, and instead of being
  stationary, the Earth revolved around the Sun in
  the course of a year while rotating once every
  twenty-four hours about its axis.

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The Copernican Model
CIRCULAR
ORBITS
SATURN
MARS
JUPITER
VENUS
MERCURY
SUN
SUN
MOON
EARTH
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Copernicus Motivation

• Copernicus believed that having the Sun at the
  center of the universe (heliocentric) glorified
  God.
• His reasoning seems to have been predominantly
  motivated by aesthetics. In his view, equally
  spaced planets in circular orbits would represent
  harmony in the universe.

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The Catholic Church

• The Church, objected to the removal of the Earth
  from the center of the universe.
• The teachings of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy,
  who justified Aristotles qualitative model by
  making it quantitative, were considered, because
  of Aquinas winning argument, Gods truth.
• Because the Ptolemaic system enjoyed the
  endorsement not only of scholars, but also of the
  Church, Copernicus, in fear of trial for heresy,
  long hesitated to announce his heliocentric view.
  

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The Catholic Church

• The fear instilled by the Church made it
  understandable why Copernicus' teachings were not
  greatly noticed at first, and filtered very
  slowly into the European consciousness.
• This hostile reception of the correction of an
  established erroneous theory proved that
  scientific investigation was a threat to
  authority.

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About the Model

• Copernicus offered mathematics which were as
  complicated as Ptolomys, and because he retained
  circular orbits, his system required the awkward
  inclusion of epicycles and their accompanying
  complication.
• Although his description was not any simpler than
  Ptolomys, it did require fewer basic assumptions
  (Ockam's Razor).
• In Copernicus's universe, unlike Ptolemy's, the
  greater the radius of a planet's orbit, the
  greater the time the planet takes to make one
  circuit around the sun.

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About the Model

• Copernicus's theory explained some problems,
  such as
• 1. The reason that Mercury and Venus Vare only
  observed close to the Sun. Their orbits always
  kept them nearer the Sun than the Earth.
• 2. Retrograde motion (Platos Homework Problem).
  The Earth, traveling in its smaller orbit,
  overtakes Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, causing them
  to appear to move change direction and move
  backward relative to distant "fixed" stars.

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About the Model

• Another important feature of Copernican theory is
  that it allowed a new ordering of the planets
  according to their periods of revolution.
• The sphere of the fixed stars is followed by the
  first of the planets, Saturn, which completes its
  circuit in 30 years. After Saturn, Jupiter
  accomplishes its revolution in 12 years. Then
  Mars revolves in two years. The annual revolution
  takes the series' fourth place, which contains
  the earth, together with the lunar sphere as an
  epicycle.

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About the Model

• In the fifth place Venus returns in nine months.
  Lastly, the sixth place is held by Mercury, which
  revolves in a period of 80 days.
• However, like Ptolomy, Copernicus still could not
  explain variations in the brightness of Venus.
• But Copernicus had made no observations and
  stated no general laws.
• His mathematics could describe the motion of the
  planets, but his theory was of a very ad hoc
  nature.

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Significance

• It is likely, in fact, that Kepler would have
  independently arrived at a heliocentric theory
  just in the process of interpreting Brahes data,
  and the scientific revolution would have been
  born anyway.
• To a large extent, then, Copernicus has achieved
  his prominent place in history through what
  amounted to a lucky, albeit shrewd, guess.
• It is therefore more appropriate to view
  Copernicus's achievements as a preliminary step
  towards scientific revolution, rather than a
  revolution in itself.

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Significance

• Copernicus was the first person in history to
  create a complete and general system, combining
  mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
• It took the accurate observational work of Brahe,
  the exhaustive mathematics of Kepler, and the
  mathematical genius of Newton to take
  Copernicus's theory as a starting point, and
  glean from it the underlying truths and laws
  governing celestial mechanics.

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Significance

• Copernicus was an important player in the
  development of these theories, but his work would
  likely have likely remained in relative obscurity
  without the observational work of Brahe.

1543 marks the beginning of the Classical
Scientific Revolution.
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Francis Bacon(1561-1626)

• Bacon, Francis (philosopher) (1561-1626), English
  philosopher and statesman, one of the pioneers of
  modern scientific thought.
• Bacon's writings fall into three categories
  philosophical, purely literary, and professional.
  The best of his philosophical works are The
  Advancement of Learning (1605), a review in
  English of the state of knowledge in his own
  time, and Novum Organum or, Indications
  Respecting the Interpretation of Nature (1620).

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Francis Bacon

• Bacon's Novum Organum successfully influenced the
  acceptance of accurate observation and
  experimentation in science.
• In it he maintained that all prejudices and
  preconceived attitudes, which he called idols,
  must be abandoned, whether they be the common
  property of the race due to common modes of
  thought (idols of the tribe), or the peculiar
  possession of the individual (idols of the
  cave) whether they arise from too great a
  dependence on language (idols of the
  marketplace), or from tradition (idols of the
  theater).

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Francis Bacon

• The principles laid down in the Novum Organum had
  an important influence on the subsequent
  development of empiricist thought (see
  Empiricism).

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René Descartes(1596 1650)

• Descartes was French philosopher, scientist, and
  mathematician, sometimes called the father of
  modern philosophy.
• The most notable contribution that Descartes made
  to mathematics was the systematization of
  analytic geometry.
• He was the first mathematician to attempt to
  classify curves according to the types of
  equations that produce them.

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René Descartes

• Descartes also made contributions to the theory
  of equations. Descartes was the first to use the
  last letters of the alphabet to designate unknown
  quantities and the first letters to designate
  known ones.
• His explanations of scientific phenomena, while
  often erroneous, had value, however, because he
  substituted a system of mechanical
  interpretations of physical phenomena for the
  vague spiritual concepts of most earlier writers.