Scientific Revolution
Galileo to Newton
The World That Aristotle Built
the coherent, beautiful, authority-locked cosmos the revolution was done to
the setting, ~1500
The Quiet Bomb
Copernicus moves the Earth almost by accident, and Vesalius opens the body
1543
The Man With the Golden Nose
Tycho Brahe demolishes the unchanging heavens by measuring
1546–1601
War on Mars
Kepler refuses to round away eight arcminutes and breaks the circle
1571–1630
The Starry Messenger
Galileo points the new instrument up and makes the world look
1564–1610
The Trial of Galileo
not science versus religion but who gets to say what counts as proven
1611–1642
Two Roads to Truth
Bacon's induction and Descartes' doubt, the two methods still argued today
1620–1650
The Body as a Machine
Harvey turns arithmetic on the heart and the body becomes mechanism
1543–1680
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
a tube of mercury, a mountain, and sixteen horses kill a pillar of Aristotle
1643–1654
The Air-Pump and the Birth of the Lab
Boyle's glass globe and the invention of the matter of fact
1659–1680
The Republic of Letters
the social machine for making knowledge cumulative
1640–1680
Worlds Without End
the telescope makes the cosmos vertiginously, unimaginably larger
1655–1690
The Invisible Kingdom
the microscope finds that complexity has no floor
1665–1700
The Language of Nature
the bet that nature is written in mathematics, and the tools that paid it
1585–1680
Newton I: The Miracle Years
the secretive, alchemy-obsessed heretic with three revolutions in a drawer
1642–1684
The System of the World
Halley pries out the Principia and proves there was never a wall
1684–1687
The Calculus War
the era's greatest tool, invented twice, and the feud that captured the machinery
1665–1716
The Newtonian World
the Principia packaged into an ideology its author would have called heresy
1687–1727
What the Revolution Left Out
witch-hunts in the age of Newton, women barred, knowledge extracted
1543–1727
Why Europe? Why Then?
was it even a revolution, and why here given Europe started behind
the argument