Which renaissance invention transformed the acquisition of knowledge

Before the Scientific Revolution, this method of gaining knowledge was uncommon. Some of the main ideas of science had been expressed long before the Scientific Revolution. In fact, some of the basic ideas of science are ancient.

Many Greek thinkers expressed ideas that, today, we would call scientific. The great philosopher Aristotle, for example, wrote about astronomy, geography, and many other fields. But his greatest contribution to science was the idea that people should observe the world carefully and draw logical conclusions about what they see. The use of observation and logic, as you have just read, is important in gaining scientific knowledge. He studied the skies, recorded his observations, and offered theories to explain what he saw.

Ptolemy was also a geographer who made the best maps of his time. His maps were based on observations of the real world. Aristotle, Ptolemy, and other Greek thinkers were rationalists, people who looked at the world in a rational, or reasonable and logical, way. During the Renaissance, Europeans studied the works of Greek rationalists. As a result, they began to view the world in a rational way. They began to think like scientists.

European scholars could study ancient Greek writings because of the work of others. Muslim scholars translated Greek writings into Arabic. They studied them for centuries and added their own new ideas. Later, the Arabic versions were translated into Latin, which was read in Europe.

This work preserved ancient knowledge and spread interest in science to Europe. Other religious scholars also played a role in preserving Greek ideas. The Scientific Revolution was not just the result of European scholars studying ancient Greek writings. Developments in Europe also helped bring about the Scientific Revolution. One development that helped lead to the Scientific Revolution was the growth of humanism during the Renaissance.

Humanist artists and writers spent much of their time studying the natural world. This interest in the natural world carried forward into the Scientific Revolution. Another development was a growing interest in alchemy AL-kuh-mee. Alchemy was a forerunner of chemistry. Alchemists experimented with various natural substances. They were best known for trying to change other metals into gold. Although they failed at that, alchemists succeeded in using experiments to learn more about how nature worked.

All of these developments—the interest in ancient Greek writings, the growth of humanism, the experiments of alchemists—came together in the early s to bring about the Scientific Revolution. During the Renaissance, European scholars eagerly read and studied the works of Greek rationalists. Aristotle, Ptolemy, and others were viewed as authorities. Then an event took place that caused Europeans to doubt some of what the Greeks had said. As a guide, he took the map of the world that Ptolemy had created.

Columbus never reached Asia because he ran into North America instead. This discovery stunned Europeans. Ptolemy was wrong. Observation of the real world had disproved the teachings of an ancient authority. Soon, European scholars began to question the accuracy of other Greek authorities.

More and more, observations the Europeans made did not fit with what the authorities had described. Such observations helped lead to the Scientific Revolution. In an astronomer published a book that contradicted what a Greek authority had written.

Many historians think the publication of this book marks the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. His book was called On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres.

Ptolemy had written that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and other planets orbited, or circled around, the earth. For 1, years, people accepted this belief as fact. As Copernicus studied the movements of the planets, however, what Ptolemy stated made less and less sense to him. If the planets were indeed orbiting the earth, they would have to be moving in very complex patterns.

So Copernicus tried a different explanation for what he observed in the sky. Copernicus asked, What if the planets actually orbited the sun? What Copernicus had done was practice science. Instead of trying to make his observations fit an old idea, he came up with a different idea—a different theory—to explain what he observed. Copernicus never proved his theory, but the Scientific Revolution had begun.

Brahe, who was Danish, spent most of his life observing the stars. In the late s, he charted the positions of more than of them. What Brahe did, however, was less important than how he did it. Brahe emphasized the importance of careful observation and detailed, accurate records.

Careful recording of information is necessary so that other scientists can use what has previously been learned. In this way, Brahe made an important contribution to modern science. Brahe was assisted by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Later, Kepler tried to map the orbits of the planets. But Kepler ran into a problem. According to his observations, the planet Mars did not move in a circle as he expected it to. Printing books was a vastly swifter system than handwriting books was, and paper was much less expensive to produce than parchment.

Before the printing press, books were generally commissioned and then copied. In medieval times, books were the valuable, rare product of hundreds if not thousands of hours of work, and no two were the same.

After Gutenberg, books could be standardized, plentiful, and relatively cheap to produce and disseminate. Early printed books were made to look like illuminated manuscripts, complete with hand-drawn decorations. However, printers soon realized the economic potential of producing multiple identical copies of one text, and book printing soon became a speculative business, with printers trying to guess how many copies a particular book could sell.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center estimates that before the invention of the printing press, the total number of books in all of Europe was around 30, By CE, the book was thriving as an industrial object, and the number of books in Europe had grown to as many as 10 to 12 million Jones, The post—Gutenberg world was revolutionized by the advent of the printed book.

One thing that did not substantially change, however, was the form of the book itself. Despite minor tweaks and alterations, the ancient form of the codex remained relatively intact. What did rapidly evolve was the way books were produced and distributed and the way information circulated through the world. Simply put, the mechanical reproduction of books meant that there were more books available at a lower cost, and the growth of international trade allowed these books to have a wider reach.

The desire for knowledge among the growing middle class and the new availability of classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome helped fuel the Renaissance, a period of celebration of the individual and of a turn toward humanism.

For the first time, texts could be widely dispersed, allowing political, intellectual, religious, and cultural ideas to spread widely. Also for the first time, many people could read the same books and be exposed to the same ideas at the same time, giving rise to mass media and mass culture. Science was revolutionized as well. For example, standardized, widely dispersed texts meant that scientists in Italy were exposed to the theories and discoveries of scientists in England.

Because of improved communication, technological and intellectual ideas spread more quickly, enabling scientists from disparate areas to more easily build on the breakthroughs and successes of others. As the Renaissance progressed, the size of the middle class grew, as did literacy rates. Rather than a few hundred precious volumes housed in monastery or university libraries, books were available to people outside monastic or university settings, which meant that more books were available to women.

In effect, the mass production of books helped knowledge become democratized. Thanks in part to the spread of dissenting ideas, the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant institution of medieval Europe, found its control slipping.

One book the church banned was the Bible printed in any language other than Latin—a language that few people outside of clerical or scholarly circles understood. In , Martin Luther instigated the Protestant Reformation. The church rightly feared the spread of vernacular Bibles; the more people who had access to the text, the less control the church was able to exert over how it was interpreted.

Genres with popular appeal, such as plays and poetry, became increasingly widespread. In the 16th and 17th centuries, inexpensive chapbooks the name derives, appropriately enough, from cheap books became popular.

Chapbooks were small and cheaply printed, and they often included popular ballads, humorous stories, or religious tracts. The proliferation of chapbooks showed just how much the Gutenberg Revolution had transformed the written word.

In just a few hundred years, many people had access to reading material, and books would no longer be considered sacred objects. Because of the high value placed on human knowledge during the Renaissance, libraries flourished during this time period. As they had been in ancient Egypt, libraries were once again a way of displaying national power and wealth. Libraries were also associated with universities, clubs, and museums; however, these were often only for subscribers.

Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie helped bring the Renaissance ideals of artistic patronage and democratized knowledge into the 20th century when he helped found more than 1, public libraries between and Krasner-Khait, Before the mass production of books, authorship had few financial rewards unless a generous patron got involved. The earliest concept of the copyright, from the time of the scriptoria, was who had the right to copy a book by hand.

The printed book, however, was a speculative commercial enterprise, in that large numbers of identical copies could be sold. The explosive growth of the European printing industry meant that authors could potentially profit from the books they made and then wrote if their legal rights were recognized.

In contemporary terms, copyright allows a person the right to exclude others from copying, distributing, and selling a work.

This is a right usually given to the creator, although that right can be sold or otherwise transferred. Works not covered by copyright or for which the copyright has expired are part of the public domain , which means that they are essentially public property and can be used freely by anyone without permission or royalty payments.

The origins of contemporary copyright law are usually traced back to the Statute of Queen Anne. This law, enacted in England in , was the first to recognize the legal rights of authors, though in an incomplete manner. Anyone who infringed on a copyrighted work paid a fine, half of which went to the author and half to the government.

Early copyright was intended to limit monopoly and censorship, to provide a sense of stability to authors, and to promote learning by ensuring that documents would be widely accessible. The United States established its first copyright law not long after the Declaration of Independence. The U.

The first federal copyright law, the Copyright Law of , was modeled on the Statute of Queen Anne and it similarly granted exclusive rights for 14 years, renewable for 14 more if the author was living at the end of the first term.

The Copyright Act of allowed for an initial year term of copyright, which was renewable for one additional year term. The law, called the Copyright Term Extension Act, also added a year extension to all currently copyrighted works.

This automatic extension meant that no new works would enter the public domain until at the earliest. Because of the year copyright extension, Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters remained out of the public domain, which meant that they were still the exclusive property of Disney.

Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, and David Hume were the primary exponents of empiricism, and developed a sophisticated empirical tradition as the basis of human knowledge. The recognized founder of the approach was John Locke, who proposed in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the only true knowledge that could be accessible to the human mind was that which was based on experience.

Many new ideas contributed to what is called the scientific revolution. Some of them were revolutions in their own fields. These include:. The Shannon Portrait of the Hon. Robert Boyle F. Boyle is known for his pioneering experiments on the physical properties of gases, his authorship of the Sceptical Chymist, his role in creating the Royal Society of London, and his philanthropy in the American colonies.

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment The scientific revolution laid the foundations for the Age of Enlightenment, which centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and emphasized the importance of the scientific method. By the 18th century, when the Enlightenment flourished, scientific authority began to displace religious authority, and disciplines until then seen as legitimately scientific e. Science came to play a leading role in Enlightenment discourse and thought.

Many Enlightenment writers and thinkers had backgrounds in the sciences, and associated scientific advancement with the overthrow of religion and traditional authority in favor of the development of free speech and thought. Broadly speaking, Enlightenment science greatly valued empiricism and rational thought, and was embedded with the Enlightenment ideal of advancement and progress. At the time, science was dominated by scientific societies and academies, which had largely replaced universities as centers of scientific research and development.

Societies and academies were also the backbone of the maturation of the scientific profession. Another important development was the popularization of science among an increasingly literate population. The century saw significant advancements in the practice of medicine, mathematics, and physics; the development of biological taxonomy; a new understanding of magnetism and electricity; and the maturation of chemistry as a discipline, which established the foundations of modern chemistry.

This work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles. His laws of motion were to be the solid foundation of mechanics. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European scientists began increasingly applying quantitative measurements to the measurement of physical phenomena on the earth, which translated into the rapid development of mathematics and physics.

Distinguish between the different key figures of the scientific revolution and their achievements in mathematics and physics. The philosophy of using an inductive approach to nature—to abandon assumption and to attempt to simply observe with an open mind—was in strict contrast with the earlier, Aristotelian approach of deduction, by which analysis of known facts produced further understanding.

In practice, many scientists and philosophers believed that a healthy mix of both was needed—the willingness to question assumptions, yet also to interpret observations assumed to have some degree of validity. That principle was particularly true for mathematics and physics. To the extent that medieval natural philosophers used mathematical problems, they limited social studies to theoretical analyses of local speed and other aspects of life.

The actual measurement of a physical quantity, and the comparison of that measurement to a value computed on the basis of theory, was largely limited to the mathematical disciplines of astronomy and optics in Europe. In the 16th and 17th centuries, European scientists began increasingly applying quantitative measurements to the measurement of physical phenomena on Earth.

The book proposed a heliocentric system contrary to the widely accepted geocentric system of that time. However, Tycho challenged the Aristotelian model when he observed a comet that went through the region of the planets.

This region was said to only have uniform circular motion on solid spheres, which meant that it would be impossible for a comet to enter into the area. Johannes Kepler followed Tycho and developed the three laws of planetary motion.

Kepler would not have been able to produce his laws without the observations of Tycho, because they allowed Kepler to prove that planets traveled in ellipses, and that the sun does not sit directly in the center of an orbit, but at a focus. Galileo Galilei came after Kepler and developed his own telescope with enough magnification to allow him to study Venus and discover that it has phases like a moon. The discovery of the phases of Venus was one of the more influential reasons for the transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism.

The development of his laws of planetary motion and universal gravitation explained the presumed motion related to the heavens by asserting a gravitational force of attraction between two objects. Galileo was one of the first modern thinkers to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of science from both philosophy and religion, a major development in human thought.

Galileo showed a remarkably modern appreciation for the proper relationship between mathematics, theoretical physics, and experimental physics. He understood the parabola, both in terms of conic sections and in terms of the ordinate y varying as the square of the abscissa x. He further asserted that the parabola was the theoretically ideal trajectory of a uniformly accelerated projectile in the absence of friction and other disturbances.

This work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth, and of celestial bodies, could be described by the same principles.

His prediction that Earth should be shaped as an oblate spheroid was later vindicated by other scientists. His laws of motion were to be the solid foundation of mechanics; his law of universal gravitation combined terrestrial and celestial mechanics into one great system that seemed to be able to describe the whole world in mathematical formulae.

Newton also developed the theory of gravitation. After the exchanges with Robert Hooke, English natural philosopher, architect, and polymath, he worked out proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. The scientific revolution also witnessed the development of modern optics. In it, he described the inverse-square law governing the intensity of light, reflection by flat and curved mirrors, and principles of pinhole cameras, as well as the astronomical implications of optics, such asparallax and the apparent sizes of heavenly bodies.

He also independently discovered the law of reflection. Finally, Newton investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colors, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicolored spectrum into white light.

He also showed that the colored light does not change its properties by separating out a colored beam and shining it on various objects. Galileo Galilei improved the telescope, with which he made several important astronomical discoveries, including the four largest moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the rings of Saturn, and made detailed observations of sunspots.

He developed the laws for falling bodies based on pioneering quantitative experiments, which he analyzed mathematically. He also discovered that a heated body lost its electricity, and that moisture prevented the electrification of all bodies, due to the now well-known fact that moisture impaired the insulation of such bodies. He also noticed that electrified substances attracted all other substances indiscriminately, whereas a magnet only attracted iron.

In , he stated that electric attraction and repulsion can act across a vacuum. One of his important discoveries was that electrified bodies in a vacuum would attract light substances, this indicating that the electrical effect did not depend upon the air as a medium.

He also added resin to the then known list of electrics. By the end of the 17th Century, researchers had developed practical means of generating electricity by friction with an anelectrostatic generator, but the development of electrostatic machines did not begin in earnest until the 18th century, when they became fundamental instruments in the studies about the new science of electricity.

The first usage of the word electricity is ascribed to Thomas Browne in work. Treasures of the RAS: Starry Messenger by Galileo Galilei : In , Galileo published this book describing his observations of the sky with a new invention — the telescope. In it he describes his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, of stars too faint to be seen by the naked eye, and of mountains on the moon.

The book was the first scientific publication to be based on data from a telescope. It was an important step towards our modern understanding of the solar system.