Timeline and Period of the Scientific Revolution
A narrative tour through the Scientific Revolution — from Copernicus in 1543 to Newton in 1687 — covering major works, persons, and events in three phases.
Timeline and Period of the Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution unfolded over more than a century and a half, from the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in 1543 to the appearance of Newton’s Principia in 1687. It was not a single event but a sequence of overlapping transformations, in astronomy, physics, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and mathematics, all of which contributed to a new conception of the natural world. This section walks through that period in three broad phases: the early phase from 1543 to 1600, the middle phase from 1600 to 1680, and the late phase from 1680 to 1700 and beyond. The articles treat specific chronological questions: the key dates of the revolution, how long it lasted, and when it ended.
The Early Phase (c. 1543–1600)
The early phase of the Scientific Revolution is the work of solitary thinkers working within a still largely Aristotelian framework, gradually undermining it from within. The dominant problems of the period are astronomical and anatomical: how to account for the new observations, and how to integrate them into a coherent picture of the cosmos.
The Astronomical Revolution
The opening act is Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543), which proposed that the earth is not the center of the cosmos but a planet orbiting the sun, together with the other five known planets, in a series of circular orbits. The book was technically complex, theologically suspect, and accepted by very few natural philosophers for almost a century. Yet it established a new agenda for astronomy that would dominate the rest of the period. The work of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was the next decisive step. Working in Denmark and then in Prague, Tycho built a great observatory at Uraniborg and produced a body of naked-eye astronomical observations unprecedented in accuracy. He proposed a hybrid geo-heliocentric system — the earth at the center, the sun orbiting the earth, and the other planets orbiting the sun — that preserved the physical reasonableness of the Ptolemaic system while accepting the mathematical advantages of the Copernican. Tycho’s observations were the empirical foundation on which Kepler would build. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) inherited Tycho’s observations after the latter’s death in 1601 and spent the next two decades extracting from them the laws of planetary motion: that the planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus (1609); that a line joining a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times (also 1609); and that the square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit (1619). Kepler’s work, though it used the methods of the new astronomy, was grounded in a strong Neoplatonic and even mystical vision of the cosmos as a product of mathematical harmony.
The Anatomical Revolution
In 1543, the same year as Copernicus, Andreas Vesalius published De Humani Corporis Fabrica in Basel. The Fabrica was based on direct dissection of the human body, and it systematically corrected many of Galen’s errors of anatomy that had been accepted for over a millennium. The book is also a landmark in the visual culture of the Renaissance: its woodcut illustrations, produced in collaboration with the artists of Titian’s workshop in Venice, established a new standard for anatomical illustration that would persist for centuries. The anatomical revolution was extended in the seventeenth century by William Harvey (1578–1657), who in 1628 published De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart), demonstrating that the blood circulates around the body in a continuous loop driven by the pumping of the heart. Harvey’s work is sometimes taken as the first great physiological discovery of the Scientific Revolution, and it is also a model of the new method: a combination of careful observation, quantitative measurement, and deductive reasoning.
The Middle Phase (c. 1600–1680)
The middle phase is the period in which the new methods are consciously constructed, the new institutions are founded, and the major figures of the revolution — Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Boyle, Huygens, Hooke, and others — do their most characteristic work. It is also the period in which the new science becomes a public and contested enterprise, no longer the private pursuit of solitary scholars.
Galileo and the New Astronomy
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is the most visible figure of the middle phase. His astronomical work, beginning in 1609 with his improvements to the recently invented telescope, transformed observational astronomy. He discovered the mountains of the moon, the four largest moons of Jupiter (which he called the Medicean Stars in honor of his Medici patrons), the phases of Venus, and sunspots. Each of these discoveries posed problems for the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian world-picture and supported, in different ways, the Copernican. The controversy over heliocentrism is one of the central dramas of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) was a brilliant popular defense of the Copernican system; it led to his trial and condemnation by the Roman Inquisition in 1633. The story is told in the article on the Trial of Galileo. Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest, producing his most important work on mechanics, the Two New Sciences (1638), which formulated the laws of falling bodies, parabolic projectile motion, and the strength of materials.
Descartes and the Mechanical Philosophy
René Descartes (1596–1650) is the other great figure of the middle phase. His Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) developed a new mechanistic philosophy of nature in which all physical phenomena — including the workings of the human body — were to be explained in terms of the motion and collision of corpuscles. Descartes’s program was a deliberate construction of an alternative to the Aristotelian-Scholastic synthesis, founded on clear and distinct ideas, deductive reasoning, and the model of mathematical demonstration. His influence on the growth of physics, physiology, and philosophy was immense.
Bacon and the New Method
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the English philosopher and Lord Chancellor, advanced a different but complementary program in his Novum Organum (1620). Where Descartes emphasized deduction from clear and distinct ideas, Bacon emphasized inductive reasoning from carefully gathered observations. The two programs — deductive-rationalist and inductive-empiricist — defined the principal philosophical orientations of the early-modern period and are examined in detail in the Philosophy of Science section.
The Royal Society and the Académie
The institutionalization of the new science was one of the great achievements of the middle phase. The Accademia del Cimento, founded in Florence in 1657 by Galileo’s student Vincenzo Viviani and the Medici, was the first formal experimental society. The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660 and chartered in 1662, and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, founded in 1666, established the model of the modern scientific academy. These institutions provided meeting places, instruments, and a public forum for the new science. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, founded in 1665, was the first scientific journal and helped create a continuous public conversation among natural philosophers across Europe.
The Late Phase (c. 1680–1700+)
The late phase of the Scientific Revolution is dominated by Isaac Newton, who brought together the achievements of the previous century and the work of his own generation into a single mathematical system. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) — the Principia — established the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, demonstrated that the same gravitational force that pulls an apple to the earth also keeps the moon in its orbit and the planets around the sun, and provided a mathematical template for natural philosophy that would persist for two centuries. Newton’s Opticks (1704) extended the new approach to light, color, and the nature of matter, presenting a corpuscular theory of light that competed with Huygens’s wave theory for the next century. The Opticks also contained Newton’s famous “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy,” which articulated a sophisticated form of empirical natural philosophy — neither naive inductivism nor pure rationalism — that became a model for the work of later scientists. By the time of Newton’s death in 1727, the methods and ambitions of the new natural philosophy were firmly established. The problems of motion, gravitation, optics, and mechanics had been, in their broad outlines, resolved. The next century would extend the new methods to electricity, magnetism, heat, chemistry, and the life sciences, and would develop them into the modern discipline of physics.
The Longer View
It is important to remember that the three-phase division used here is a convenience, not a sharp historical fact. The astronomical, anatomical, and mechanical work of the early phase continued into the middle and late phases; Galileo’s telescopic discoveries were made in 1609, but Galileo’s most important work on mechanics came in 1638; Newton’s optical work, begun in the 1660s, was published in 1704. The major figures of the revolution often worked in multiple phases, and the boundaries between the phases are porous. The conventional endpoint of 1687, set by the Principia, is itself contested. Some historians extend the revolution through Newton’s Opticks (1704) or through the death of Newton in 1727; some argue for a longer period running into the Enlightenment; some push the beginning back into the late Middle Ages. The full debate is examined in How Long Did the Scientific Revolution Last? and When Did the Scientific Revolution End?.
The Wider Geography
The revolution was not confined to one country. The opening moves came from Poland (Copernicus), the Low Countries (Vesalius, Stevin, Huygens), Italy (Galileo, Torricelli, the Accademia del Cimento), Bohemia (Kepler, working in Prague), France (Descartes, Pascal, Mersenne), and England (Bacon, Boyle, Newton). Italy dominated the first half of the seventeenth century; the English, the Dutch, and the French dominated the second half. The map of the revolution is, in part, a map of patronage — of courts, academies, and universities, of Medici Florence, Bourbon Paris, and Stuart and Hanoverian London.
Summary
The Scientific Revolution unfolded in three overlapping phases. The early phase (1543–1600) was dominated by the astronomical work of Copernicus, Tycho, and Kepler, and the anatomical work of Vesalius and Harvey. The middle phase (1600–1680) was dominated by Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Boyle, and Huygens, and by the foundation of the Royal Society and the Académie. The late phase (1680–1700+) was dominated by Newton, whose Principia (1687) brought the work of the revolution to a culminating synthesis. The major events of this period are listed in chronological order in Key Dates of the Scientific Revolution, and the broader chronological questions are taken up in the section’s other articles.