Key Dates of the Scientific Revolution
A chronological list of the key dates and works of the Scientific Revolution, from Copernicus's De Revolutionibus in 1543 to Newton's Principia in 1687.
Key Dates of the Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution is usually dated to a sequence of landmark publications and discoveries, most of which occurred between 1543 and 1687. The list below is a chronological narrative of the most important of them. It is not a complete catalog of the period’s many achievements, but a guide to the events that any reader of the Scientific Revolution will encounter.
1543 — Copernicus and Vesalius
The year 1543 is conventionally the opening of the Scientific Revolution. In that year, two foundational works were published, almost simultaneously, in Basel and Nuremberg. Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish canon of the cathedral of Frauenburg, had been working on De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs) for over three decades. The book, published shortly before his death, proposed a heliocentric solar system: the planets, including the earth, move around the sun in a series of circular orbits, with the moon orbiting the earth. Copernicus’s system was mathematically more complex than Ptolemy’s and physically less plausible by the standards of the day — it seemed absurd to suppose that the solid earth was spinning rapidly through space. Yet it had important advantages, and it set the agenda for the next century of astronomy. The details of the book are examined in the page on What Did Copernicus Write in De Revolutionibus?. Andreas Vesalius, a young Flemish anatomist at the University of Padua, published De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in the same year. The Fabrica was based on direct dissection of human bodies and systematically corrected many of Galen’s anatomical errors. Its woodcut illustrations, produced in collaboration with the artists of Titian’s workshop, set a new standard for the visual documentation of nature.
1609 — Galileo’s Telescope
In the summer of 1609, Galileo Galilei, then professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, learned of the recent invention of the telescope in the Netherlands. He quickly improved the design and turned the new instrument on the heavens. His observations, published in Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger) in March 1610, were the first systematic telescopic observations in the history of astronomy. Among the discoveries announced in Sidereus Nuncius: the moon is not a smooth, perfect sphere, as Aristotle had taught, but a body with mountains and valleys like the earth; the Milky Way is composed of innumerable faint stars; and four new “Medicean stars” (now called the Galilean moons) orbit Jupiter. The discovery of Jovian moons was particularly important, because it showed that not every celestial body orbits the earth — a fact incompatible with the Ptolemaic system. These and other observations are explored in detail in the page on Galileo’s Telescope Discoveries.
1610 — Sidereus Nuncius
The publication of Sidereus Nuncius in Venice in March 1610 was one of the great publishing events of the Scientific Revolution. Galileo had prepared the book in almost indecent haste, and the small quarto volume was widely read across Europe within months. The book was also a piece of patronage: Galileo had named the new moons of Jupiter after the Medici, in the hope of securing a position at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was successful; in the autumn of 1610 he left Padua for Florence.
1619 — Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi
In 1619, Johannes Kepler published Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the World), the fifth and culminating book of his grand cosmological project. The book contained his third law of planetary motion: the square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Kepler’s three laws, derived from Tycho Brahe’s observations, provided the precise mathematical description of planetary motion that the heliocentric system had long required. Harmonices Mundi also contained a great deal of Kepler’s characteristic mystical and Neoplatonic speculation about musical harmony in the cosmos. The combination of rigorous quantitative work and metaphysical vision is characteristic of Kepler’s work as a whole.
1620 — Bacon’s Novum Organum
In 1620, Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum (The New Organon), the first major installment of his projected Instauratio Magna, a great six-part work designed to reform the whole of human knowledge. The Novum Organum criticized the Aristotelian-Scholastic logic and proposed a new method of inquiry based on the gradual ascent from particular observations to general axioms. Bacon’s method, with its emphasis on careful observation, controlled experiment, and the systematic tabulation of instances, was enormously influential in the seventeenth century, especially in England. It is examined in detail in the page on Philosophy of Science.
1628 — Harvey’s De Motu Cordis
In 1628, William Harvey published De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart) in Frankfurt. The book demonstrated, on the basis of careful anatomical observation, comparative anatomy, and quantitative reasoning, that the blood circulates around the body in a continuous loop driven by the pumping of the heart. Harvey’s discovery overturned the Galenic model of blood flow — which had been accepted for fifteen centuries — and helped to establish the new physiology of the seventeenth century.
1632 — Galileo’s Dialogue
In 1632, Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in Florence. The book took the form of a four-day conversation among three speakers: Salviati, who argues for the Copernican system; Sagredo, an intelligent layman; and Simplicio, a defender of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view. The Dialogue was a brilliant popular defense of heliocentrism, written in Italian rather than Latin, and accessible to a wide educated audience. The book provoked a strong reaction from the Roman Inquisition, which had previously warned Galileo not to defend the Copernican view. The story of the trial that followed is told in The Trial of Galileo.
1633 — Galileo’s Trial
In June 1633, after a formal trial, Galileo founded “vehemently suspect of heresy” and was forced to recant his Copernican views. He was sentenced to formal imprisonment, which was commuted to house arrest, and the Dialogue placedd on the Index of Prohibited Books. Galileo spent the remaining eight years of his life at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, under the watchful eye of the Inquisition. Yet even in this enforced retirement, he produced his most important work on mechanics, the Two New Sciences (1638).
1637 — Descartes’s Discourse on Method
In 1637, René Descartes published anonymously in Leiden his Discourse on Method, together with three scientific appendices: the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry. The Discourse is a kind of intellectual autobiography, in which Descartes describes the program of methodical doubt and the search for clear and distinct ideas; the Geometry is one of the founding texts of analytic geometry; the Dioptrics and Meteors apply the new mechanistic philosophy to optics and meteorology. The Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) developed the philosophical core of the new program more systematically.
1643 — Torricelli’s Barometer
In 1643, Evangelista Torricelli, Galileo’s successor as court mathematician to the Medici, performed the experiment that produced the first sustained vacuum and the first mercury barometer. Torricelli filled a glass tube with mercury, inverted it in a basin of mercury, and observed that the column fell to a height of about 76 centimeters, leaving a vacuum at the top. The experiment demonstrated that the atmosphere exerts a finite pressure — about 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level — and that the column was being held up by that pressure. The result was a decisive refutation of the Aristotelian principle that “nature abhors a vacuum” and was the foundation of the new science of pneumatics.
1657 — The Accademia del Cimento
In 1657, the Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiment) was founded in Florence by Prince Leopold de’ Medici and Galileo Galilei’s student Vincenzo Viviani. It was the first formal society dedicated to experimental science. The Saggi di naturali esperienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento (1667) was the first published proceedings of an experimental scientific society.
1660 — The Royal Society of London
In 1660, the Royal Society of London was founded by a group of natural philosophers meeting at Gresham College. The Society received its royal charter in 1662 and has been in continuous existence since. It became the model for the modern scientific academy and a center of the new experimental science, with members including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and, after 1672, Isaac Newton.
1665–66 — Newton’s Annus Mirabilis
In 1665, the great plague forced the closure of the University of Cambridge, and Isaac Newton returned to his family home at Woolsthorpe. In the two years that followed — the annus mirabilis — he laid the foundations of three of his greatest works: the calculus (his method of “fluxions”), the theory of light and color, and the theory of universal gravitation. The full development of these ideas would take him two more decades, but the seeds of the Principia, the Opticks, and the Method of Fluxions were all planted in the plague years.
1665 — Philosophical Transactions
In March 1665, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was founded, with Henry Oldenburg as secretary. It was the first scientific journal in the modern sense, providing a continuous public record of the work of the new science. The French Journal des sçavans had been founded a few months earlier, in January 1665.
1687 — Newton’s Principia
In 1687, Isaac Newton published the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), usually known simply as the Principia. The book 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 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. The Principia is the culminating work of the Scientific Revolution, and one of the most important books in this history. See the article on the Principia Mathematica. The Principia is the conventional closing date of the revolution.