Major Discoveries and Inventions of the Scientific Revolution

Between roughly 1543 and 1700, a small constellation of European thinkers overturned a cosmology that had stood for nearly two millennia and replaced it with something fundamentally new. The discoveries of the Scientific Revolution did not arrive as a steady drip of incremental findings; they came in sections of insight that, taken together, redefined what it meant to know something. A planet showedn to orbit the Sun. A falling apple and an orbiting moon were revealed to obey the same mathematical law. The living body founded to circulate its blood in a closed loop. A new universe of creatures, too small for the naked eye to see, founded to teem inside a single drop of water. The vacuum, long declared impossible, was created on demand in a laboratory. this section surveys those breakthroughs. It is organised into three sections. The first, on Heliocentrism and the New Astronomy, traces the displacement of the Earth from the centre of the cosmos. The second, on the Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation, covers the unification of celestial and terrestrial physics in Newton’s Principia. The third, on the Telescope and the Microscope, examines the instruments that extended human perception and made the revolution empirical in a new way. For the human story behind these discoveries — the lives, conflicts, and publications of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Harvey, and Boyle — see the Key Figures of the Scientific Revolution. For the broader context that made the discoveries possible, see The Scientific Revolution: Origins, Causes, and Timeline. For the consequences that flowed from these ideas into industry, religion, and politics, see the Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society.

Why the Discoveries Matter

It is easy, in retrospect, to treat the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution as inevitable. They were not. Each one required someone to challenge an inherited authority, to trust a piece of evidence over a respected text, and to publish an argument in a form that others could test and replicate. The revolution was, in this sense, less a sequence of facts than a new way of producing facts. That said, the discoveries themselves are extraordinary on their own terms. Some — like the existence of mountains on the Moon or of Jupiter’s four large moons — were simply astonishing to contemporaries. Others — like the inverse-square law of gravitation or the law of falling bodies — were so general that they bound together phenomena previously thought to be utterly distinct. A few — like the discovery that blood circulates or that the atmosphere has weight — recast the everyday world in which everyone already lived. To appreciate their scale, it helps to walk through them in turn.

Heliocentrism: The Earth Leaves the Centre

For most of recorded history, educated Europeans believed that the Earth stood still at the centre of the universe and that the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars revolved around it. This was not superstition. It was the working cosmology of Aristotle, mathematically refined by Ptolemy in the second century AD, and embedded in Christian theology by medieval scholars who read the Bible as teaching a stationary Earth. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). His claim was stark: the Earth is a planet, it rotates on its axis once a day, and it orbits the Sun once a year, just like the other five known planets. The full consequences of this move are explored in the page on Heliocentrism and the New Astronomy, and the pre-Copernican world is sketched in What Came Before Heliocentrism?. Copernicus’s system was not yet correct. It still used circular orbits, and it required more epicycles than Ptolemy’s. What it offered was a different geometry in which the awkwardness of retrograde planetary motion became natural, and in which the size ordering of the planets no longer required an arbitrary assignment. The system was, in the phrase of astronomer Owen Gingerich, “the book that nobody read” for nearly two generations, until a young Danish observer named Tycho Brahe supplied the data that would make it workable. Tycho’s compromise — a geo-heliocentric system in which the planets orbit the Sun while the Sun orbits the stationary Earth — kept the older physics intact while salvaging the best of Copernican geometry. It is treated, alongside Kepler’s ellipses and Galileo’s telescopic evidence, in the page on Heliocentrism and the New Astronomy.

The Geometry of the Heavens: Kepler’s Three Laws

Johannes Kepler inherited Tycho Brahe’s observational records in 1601 and spent the next eighteen years trying to fit a curve to the position of Mars. The fit refused to be a circle. After rejecting one ingenious circle after another, Kepler tried an oval, then an ellipse, and in 1609 published Astronomia nova, asserting that Mars’s orbit is an ellipse with the Sun at one focus. The first two of what we now call Kepler’s three laws were in this book; the third — the harmonic law relating orbital period to orbital size — appeared in 1619 in Harmonices mundi. Kepler’s laws were empirical, not derived from any physical cause. They were also wildly accurate. They fit Tycho’s observations of Mars to within two minutes of arc, a precision that no previous scheme had matched. The mathematical form in which Kepler cast the laws — area law, ellipse law, period law — turned out to be exactly what Newton’s later theory of gravitation would derive as a theorem. For the slow process by which heliocentrism was actually confirmed, see How Was Heliocentrism Proven?.

The Telescope and the Microscope: New Eyes on the World

Two instruments invented in the early seventeenth century did more than any single book to change what people believed was real. The first was the refracting telescope, which appeared in the Netherlands in 1608 and within months had been improved by Galileo Galilei into a tool powerful enough to resolve the craters of the Moon, the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and the stars of the Milky Way. The second was the compound microscope, which made its first great impact in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of 1665 and in the painstaking observations of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. The section on the Telescope and the Microscope treats these instruments together, because the inventive problem is structurally the same: a careful arrangement of lenses to extend the reach of the eye. The origin and patenting of the refracting telescope and the early discoveries made with the microscope are detailed in their own pages. What these instruments did, philosophically, was convert cosmology from a textual into a visual discipline. The Moon was no longer a perfect celestial sphere: it had mountains. Jupiter was no longer a wandering point of light: it had moons. The Sun was no longer an unblemished emblem of divinity: it had spots that moved, that changed shape, and that allowed one to measure the rotation of the Sun. A universe that had seemed mathematically harmonious because it was uniform turned out to be a busy, textured, sometimes disorderly place.

Galileo: The Experimental Philosopher

Galileo’s contributions are difficult to separate from his instruments, but they were not only instrumental. His Two New Sciences (1638) laid the foundations of what we now call kinematics: the mathematical description of motion. He showed, by a series of careful inclined-plane experiments (in some accounts, by water-clock timing of a ball rolling down a ramp), that the distance travelled by a uniformly accelerating body grows as the square of the elapsed time. He articulated the principle of inertia — that a body in motion continues in straight-line motion at constant speed unless acted upon — in a form that be sharpened into Newton’s first law. He argued, in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), that the Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics and that the same physical laws apply to the heavens and the Earth. Galileo’s story is treated at length in the Galileo Galilei section, and his telescopic observations in Galileo’s Telescope Discoveries. For the legal and theological confrontation that resulted, see the related section on Religion and the Church during the Scientific Revolution.

The Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation

If the seventeenth century had a single culminating achievement, it was Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1687. In this work, published under the editorship and at the expense of Edmond Halley, Newton set out three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation, and from these axioms he derived Kepler’s three planetary laws, the motion of the Moon, the shape of the Earth, the cause of the tides, and the trajectories of comets. The section on the Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation is dedicated to this synthesis. The two articles within it unpack Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and the law of universal gravitation in detail. Newton’s broader life, his dispute with Leibniz over the invention of calculus, and his career at the Royal Mint are covered in the Isaac Newton, with the Principia itself examined in The Principia Mathematica. What made Newton’s achievement revolutionary was not just the equations. It was the demonstration that the same mathematical physics that described a falling apple could describe the orbit of a planet. For two thousand years, the heavens had been treated as a separate realm governed by separate laws, perfect and unchanging. Newton’s gravitational synthesis erased that boundary.

The Vacuum and the Air Pump

Among the most striking experimental demonstrations of the seventeenth century were those performed with the air pump, an instrument developed in the 1650s by Otto von Guericke and improved by Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle for the Royal Society in London. In a glass globe from which the air had been pumped, a candle went out, a bell could not be heard, a pair of hemispheres could not be pulled apart even by large weights, and small animals perished. The demonstrations established two related conclusions: that the air has weight and exerts pressure, and that a true vacuum can be produced and sustained. Together, these claims demolished the horror vacui — the ancient doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum — which had been a working principle of physics since Aristotle. They also raised new questions about whether light and gravity could propagate through a vacuum, questions that would only be fully answered in the twentieth century. Boyle’s subsequent work — the law that bears his name, stating that at constant temperature the pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to its volume — grew directly out of these experiments and underpin the kinetic theory of gases and the industrial chemistry of gases such as oxygen and hydrogen.

The Circulation of the Blood

In 1628, the English physician William Harvey published De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart), a short book whose argument was as decisive in its field as Newton’s would be in physics. By a combination of dissection, vivisection, and quantitative reasoning, Harvey showed that the blood circulates: it leaves the heart through the arteries, passes through the lungs, returns to the heart, and is then pumped out through the arteries again. The total quantity of blood pumped per hour, he estimated, far exceeded what could be produced by the digestion of food, so the blood must be the same blood, moving in a loop. The discovery was made possible by a Renaissance recovery of anatomical practice and by careful experiment, and it illustrates a recurring pattern of the period: a doctrine inherited from antiquity (Galen’s account of blood being produced continuously by the liver and consumed by the tissues) was overturned by direct observation and quantitative argument. Capillaries, the missing link in Harvey’s account, were observed for the first time by Marcello Malpighi in 1661 with the new compound microscope. Harvey’s quantitative method deserves particular attention. He estimated the capacity of the human heart (about two fluid ounces), the frequency of the pulse (about seventy-two beats per minute), and the volume of blood ejected per beat (about a fifth to a third of the heart’s capacity), and he multiplied these numbers to obtain the volume of blood pumped per half hour — a quantity that, he pointed out, was greater than the total quantity of blood in the body. Something, therefore, must be carrying the same blood around in a loop. This style of argument — measuring, multiplying, and using the resulting numbers to refute an inherited theory — was characteristic of the new science and would become, in the hands of Newton and his successors, the standard method of mathematical physics.

Anatomy and the Study of Living Bodies

The seventeenth century also transformed anatomy. The tradition of human dissection, which had been intermittent in medieval Europe, was institutionalised in the universities of Padua, Bologna, Leiden, and elsewhere, and the publication of detailed anatomical atlases (Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica of 1543, a key precursor of the new science, is treated in the Origins and Causes) made anatomical knowledge widely available. Two anatomical discoveries of the seventeenth century are particularly important. The first is the lymphatic system: in 1622, Gaspare Aselli of Pavia identified the lacteals of the mesentery (small vessels carrying a milky fluid from the intestines); in 1651, Jean Pecquet of Paris described the thoracic duct; and in 1653, Olaus Rudbeck of Uppsala identified the lymphatic system as a whole. The lymphatics turned out to be part of a separate circulatory system that returns fluid from the tissues to the bloodstream, complementing rather than competing with Harvey’s closed-loop circulation. The second is the structure and function of the lungs. Harvey had correctly identified the pulmonary transit of the blood (blood passes from the right side of the heart through the lungs to the left side), but the purpose of this transit was not understood until the discovery of the role of air in combustion and respiration in the late eighteenth century. Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle showed in the 1660s that animals could not survive in a vacuum and that a continuous supply of fresh air was necessary for life. These experiments set the stage for the chemistry of respiration developed in the following century.

The Clock and the Measurement of Time

A surprisingly consequential discovery of the period was the accurate measurement of time. The pendulum clock, invented by Christiaan Huygens in 1656 and described in his Horologium Oscillatorium of 1673, was the first timekeeper accurate to within a minute per day, an order of magnitude better than the best earlier mechanical clocks. The improvement was made possible by Huygens’s mathematical analysis of the isochronous property of the pendulum (the period of a small swing is independent of its amplitude) and by the design of the escapement, a mechanism that supplies the pendulum with just enough energy to keep it swinging at constant amplitude. The accurate measurement of time transformed several fields. In astronomy, it made it possible to measure the right ascensions of stars, to time the transits of planets across the meridian, and to determine longitude at sea. In mechanics, it allowed the precise measurement of falling bodies and oscillating systems, and made possible the experimental kinematics of Galileo. In everyday life, it regularised the working day and the division of labour that would characterise the early modern economy. The clock also became a powerful metaphor for the new science. Descartes, in particular, compared the cosmos to a great clockwork, governed by mechanical laws and devoid of final causes. The metaphor was not just poetic: it expressed the conviction that the world could be described by a small set of general laws, that those laws could be discovered by reason and experiment, and that the result would be a comprehensive, predictive understanding of the natural order. The mechanical clock was the working model of the new science.

The Cell, the Microorganism, and the Living World

Just as the telescope made the heavens newly visible, the microscope made a hidden biological world suddenly apparent. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) introduced the word “cell” to describe the boxy compartments he saw in cork, and it showed an astonished public images of a flea, a gnat, and the compound eye of a fly in unprecedented detail. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch draper with a talent for lens-grinding, became the first human to see bacteria, protozoa, and spermatozoa, which he described in more than three hundred letters to the Royal Society between 1674 and his death in 1723. These observations eventually demolished the long-standing doctrine of spontaneous generation, opened the long path to cell theory in the nineteenth century, and initiated the discipline of microbiology. They are explored in What Did Early Microscopes Reveal?.

The Calculus and the Mathematics of Probability

Two of the most consequential mathematical developments of the period are less often classed with the “discoveries” of the Scientific Revolution, but they were essential to it. The first is the calculus, developed independently by Isaac Newton (in his Method of Fluxions, written in the 1670s but not published in that form until 1736) and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (published in 1684 and 1686). The calculus provided the language in which continuously varying quantities — velocities, accelerations, areas under curves, rates of change — could be handled with precision. Without it, Newton’s Principia would have had to spell out every limiting argument in cumbersome geometric form. The second is the mathematics of probability, founded in the correspondence of Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat in 1654 over a problem of gambling. The theory of probability quickly escaped its origins and became central to insurance, demography, the analysis of experimental error, and eventually statistical mechanics. It was, in a sense, the mathematics of uncertainty, and its invention marked a recognition that the natural world could only be known probabilistically at the level of individual events, even when it was deterministic at the level of laws.

The Chemical Elements

The seventeenth century also began the slow transformation of alchemy into chemistry. Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist (1661) attacked the classical four-element theory of Aristotle (earth, water, air, fire) and the three-principle theory of the alchemists (salt, sulphur, mercury), arguing that matter consists of corpuscles of various kinds and that the question of how many elements there are must be settled by experiment, not by appeal to ancient authority. Boyle is also credited with introducing the modern operational definition of an element as a substance that cannot be broken down into simpler substances by chemical means. The full chemical revolution would have to wait until Antoine Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century, but the conceptual groundwork — the idea of chemistry as a corpuscular, quantitative, experimentally tested discipline — was laid during the Scientific Revolution itself.

The Steam Engine and the Industrial Frontier

Although the steam engine is more often associated with the Industrial Revolution than with the Scientific Revolution, its origins are inseparable from seventeenth-century physics. The first recorded steam-driven device is the aeolipile described by Hero of Alexandria in the first century AD, but the practical steam pump was developed in the 1690s by Thomas Savery and especially by Thomas Newcomen, whose atmospheric engine of 1712 began pumping water out of Cornish tin mines. Newcomen’s design was a direct application of the fact, established by Boyle, Guericke, and others, that atmospheric pressure is a real, finite force that can do mechanical work. The connection to Newton’s physics was made explicit by James Watt in the 1760s, when his separate-condenser engine was the first to be analysed quantitatively as a thermodynamic system. The deep link between the Scientific Revolution and the technologies that followed is treated in the page on Technology and Industry in the Scientific Revolution.

A Pattern, Not a List

Taken individually, these discoveries can seem like a miscellaneous list. Taken together, they reveal a pattern. The Scientific Revolution was characterised by the replacement of authority with experiment, of qualitative description with mathematical law, of separated realms (heaven and Earth, the living and the non-living, the celestial and the terrestrial) with a unified physics, and of the closed Aristotelian cosmos with an open, possibly infinite universe governed by laws accessible to human reason. The pattern was not unique to any one discovery. It was visible in Harvey’s quantitative argument about the blood, in Galileo’s inclined-plane experiments, in Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws from gravitation, in Boyle’s refusal to accept alchemical authority, and in Leeuwenhoek’s careful letters describing what he saw through his single-lens microscopes. The discoveries were the local expressions of a new method, and the method was what would outlive the seventeenth century and become, for better and worse, the dominant way of producing reliable knowledge in the modern world.

The Slow Acceptance of New Ideas

A final point worth making is how slowly these discoveries were accepted. Copernicus’s heliocentrism was, not a single discovery but a multi-century process. Galileo’s mechanics was contested in his own time and only stabilised after Newton’s synthesis. The circulation of the blood was not universally accepted until well into the eighteenth century. Even the existence of atoms, which Boyle and Newton both advocated, would be disputed into the twentieth. The process by which heliocentrism was confirmed is a useful case study in how revolutionary science actually works: not by a single decisive experiment, but by the slow accumulation of evidence, the death of the older generation of opponents, and the integration of the new view into a younger generation’s textbooks.

The Discovery of Magnetism and Electricity

While the seventeenth century is best known for its work in astronomy, mechanics, and physiology, the foundations of two further branches of physics were also laid during the period. William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I and to King James I, published De Magnete in 1600, a careful experimental study of magnetism and static electricity that earned him a place alongside Galileo and Harvey as a founder of the new experimental philosophy. Gilbert’s central claims were several. The Earth itself is a great magnet, and the reason a compass needle points north is that the Earth magnetises it. Magnetic attraction is a property of the body itself, not (as the Aristotelians had it) of an immaterial “magnetic virtue” hovering around it. Electricity, which Gilbert distinguished from magnetism by noting that it could be produced by rubbing many substances with a suitable cloth, is similarly a property of the body, and Gilbert coined the term electricus (from the Greek ēlektron, amber) to describe it. Gilbert also tested the older claims about the lodestone — that garlic could demagnetise it, that a diamond could affect it — and dismissed them as superstition. The importance of De Magnete for the broader Scientific Revolution was methodological as much as substantive. Gilbert insisted on careful experiment, on the rejection of authority when it conflicted with observation, and on the patient accumulation of data. Francis Bacon admired the book; Galileo read it attentively. The experimental attitude that De Magnete exemplified became a model for the Royal Society and the Académie Royale des Sciences in the following century.

Huygens, Descartes, and the Mechanical Philosophy

The Scientific Revolution was carried out by a small but international community of natural philosophers who corresponded with one another, visited one another’s laboratories, and published in the new scientific journals — the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (from 1665) and the Journal des sçavans (also from 1665). The two most important figures of the generation between Galileo and Newton, often called the “mechanical philosophers,” were René Descartes in France and Christiaan Huygens in the Netherlands. Descartes, in his Principia Philosophiae (1644) and elsewhere, developed a comprehensive mechanical philosophy in which the physical world consisted entirely of corpuscles of various sizes moving in vortices of subtle matter. All physical phenomena — heat, light, magnetism, gravity, the behaviour of fluids — were to be explained by the contact action of these corpuscles. Descartes rejected action at a distance and the existence of atoms; he rejected the vacuum; and he rejected the Aristotelian forms and qualities. The Cartesian mechanical philosophy was enormously influential in the seventeenth century, especially in France and the Netherlands, and it shaped the work of many who would not have called themselves Cartesians. Huygens, working in Holland and then in Paris, made fundamental contributions to optics (the wave theory of light), mechanics (the first correct solution to the problem of colliding elastic bodies, the invention of the pendulum clock), and astronomy (the discovery of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and the correct identification of Saturn’s rings). His Horologium Oscillatorium (1673) was a masterwork of mathematical physics, in which the isochronism of the pendulum was demonstrated, the formula for the period of a simple pendulum was derived, and the concept of moment of inertia was introduced. The mechanical clock that Huygens designed was the first accurate timekeeper, with an error of less than a minute per day, and it transformed navigation and astronomy by making it possible to measure the positions of the stars with the precision that heliocentrism required. Huygens and Descartes disagreed on many points (Descartes’s vortex theory of gravity was decisively refuted by Newton), but they shared a commitment to mathematical description and to the rejection of occult qualities. Their work, together with that of Galileo, Boyle, Hooke, and Newton, constitutes the core of the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy.

The Role of the New Scientific Institutions

The discoveries of the Scientific Revolution were not made by isolated geniuses working alone. They were produced within, and supported by, a new institutional infrastructure. The most important new institution was the scientific society, of which the Accademia dei Lincei (founded 1603 in Rome, the first), the Royal Society of London (founded 1660, with a royal charter in 1662), and the Académie Royale des Sciences (founded 1666 in Paris) are the prototypes. These societies provided a regular venue for the presentation of experiments, a peer-reviewed publication in which the results could be disseminated, and a community of like-minded investigators who could replicate one another’s findings. The Royal Society, in particular, established a model that has been copied by every national academy of sciences since: weekly meetings at which experiments were performed, a commitment to empirical evidence over textual authority, and a willingness to publish negative results. The motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in verba (“on the word of no one”), expressed the principle that no claim should be accepted on authority alone. The scientific societies were also, importantly, international. Members corresponded across borders, translated one another’s books, and travelled to one another’s laboratories. A French naturalist could send a specimen to a London anatomist; an Italian astronomer could read a German mathematician; a Dutch lens-grinder could supply a telescope to a Bohemian observer. The community of the Scientific Revolution was, in this sense, a transnational republic of letters, and its discoveries were the products of that community as much as of any individual mind.

Mathematics as the Language of Nature

A final and unifying feature of the Scientific Revolution was the conviction, articulated most famously by Galileo in Il Saggiatore (1623) — that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. This conviction was not new; Pythagoras, Plato, and the medieval tradition of quadrivium had all asserted the importance of mathematics. What was new was the success with which mathematical description was applied to the actual behaviour of nature. Galileo’s parabolic trajectories, Kepler’s elliptical orbits, Newton’s inverse-square law, Huygens’s wave theory of light, the Cartesian coordinate system introduced in the Géométrie (1637), and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz all illustrate the same point: that the natural world, when properly interrogated, yielded to mathematical description in a way that the Aristotelian tradition had assumed was impossible. The triumph of mathematics in the seventeenth century is one of the great cultural facts of the period, and it is the foundation on which the modern scientific enterprise has been built. It is worth noting, however, that the success of mathematics in the period had limits. Chemistry, in particular, resisted mathematical treatment until the late eighteenth century, and biology did not become fully mathematical until the twentieth. The physics that was most successfully mathematised — astronomy, mechanics, optics — was the physics of motion and change, in which the language of functions and rates of change was the natural one. The physics that resisted mathematisation — chemistry, physiology, geology — was the physics of substances, in which the relevant categories (acidity, vitality, stratigraphic age) were not naturally described by numbers. The mathematisation of these other sciences would have to wait for new mathematical tools, new instruments, and a different intellectual climate.

A Revolution in Method, Not Only in Facts

The Scientific Revolution is, in fact, it was at least as much a revolution in method. The method had several features, none of them entirely new but all of them sharpened and combined in the seventeenth century: an insistence on direct observation, often with the help of new instruments; a willingness to set aside the testimony of ancient authorities when the evidence contradicted it; a commitment to mathematical description; a preference for mechanical explanations that did not invoke occult qualities; an openness to publication, replication, and criticism; and an institutional framework that supported all of these practices. The discoveries themselves — heliocentrism, planetary laws, the laws of motion, universal gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the cellular structure of plants, the existence of microorganisms, the inverse-square law of gravity, the wave theory of light — were the local expressions of this new method. They were astonishing individually, but the method that produced them was what would outlive the seventeenth century and become, for better and worse, the dominant way of producing reliable knowledge about the natural world.

Related Articles

• Heliocentrism and the New Astronomy
• The Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation
• The Telescope and the Microscope: New Eyes on the World
• How Was Heliocentrism Proven?
• What Came Before Heliocentrism?
• The Scientific Revolution: Origins, Causes, and Timeline
• Key Figures of the Scientific Revolution
• The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on Society