When Did the Scientific Revolution End?
Historians debate whether the Scientific Revolution ended in 1687 with Newton's Principia, in 1704 with the Opticks, or gradually merged into the Enlightenment.
When Did the Scientific Revolution End?
The conventional closing date of the Scientific Revolution is 1687, the year in which Isaac Newton published the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The Principia is the culminating work of the revolution, and its appearance is often treated as marking the end of the period in which the new natural philosophy was being actively constructed and the beginning of the period in which it was being applied, extended, and popularized. The details of the book are examined in the page on What Is in Newton’s Principia Mathematica?. Yet historians have proposed other end-dates, and the question of when the revolution ended is closely bound up with the question of what the revolution was.
The Conventional End: 1687 and the Principia
The Principia is a natural endpoint for several reasons. It brought together, into a single mathematical system, the achievements of the previous century and a half: the heliocentric system, the laws of planetary motion, the mechanics of Galileo and Huygens, the experimental physics of Boyle. It established the law of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which together provided a complete and mathematically rigorous account of the motions of the planets, the moon, the tides, and falling bodies. It also provided a methodological model — the mathematical, deductive, but empirically grounded treatment of natural phenomena — that would dominate physics for the next two centuries.
The Principia was also a deliberate closing statement. Newton presented his work in the form of a deductive mathematical system, in the tradition of Euclid, with the empirical foundations kept in the background. The book was written in Latin, addressed to the learned community of Europe, and treated as a definitive statement of natural philosophy. Whatever disputes would follow, the Principia marked the consolidation of the new science.
An Alternative End: 1704 and the Opticks
Some historians prefer to use 1704 as the closing date of the Scientific Revolution, the year in which Newton published his Opticks. The argument for this choice is that the Principia was a work of mathematical physics, while the Opticks was a work of experimental philosophy; together, they represented the full achievement of the new natural philosophy. The Opticks also articulated Newton’s famous “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy” — four methodological rules that articulated a sophisticated form of empirical natural philosophy. By 1704, the new science was complete, in the sense that it had produced a definitive statement of both its mathematical and its experimental sides.
The Opticks also represented a transition to a new phase. The book was written in English, not Latin; it was addressed to a wider audience; it posed open questions that would shape the next century of scientific work. In its method, the Opticks looks forward to the Enlightenment as much as it looks back to the seventeenth century.
A Later End: The Eighteenth Century
Other historians push the end of the Scientific Revolution well into the eighteenth century. The argument is that the new science did not become culturally dominant until after Newton’s death in 1727; that the popularization of Newtonian mechanism in the works of Voltaire, the Encyclopédie, and other Enlightenment writers was a necessary part of the revolution’s completion; and that the application of the new methods to chemistry, electricity, magnetism, and the life sciences was itself a continuation of the revolutionary transformation.
From this perspective, the Scientific Revolution was completed in the generation after Newton, by figures such as the chemist Robert Boyle (who died in 1691), the electrician Stephen Gray, the naturalists of the eighteenth century, and the great popularizers of the new science. The end of the revolution, in this view, is the beginning of the Enlightenment, examined in the page on Politics and the Enlightenment.
A Still Later End: The Nineteenth Century
A more radical position, defended by some historians, pushes the end of the Scientific Revolution into the nineteenth century. The argument is that the full institutionalization of science — with state-supported research, university chairs, research laboratories, and a professional class of scientists — was not complete until the early nineteenth century. The Chemical Revolution of Lavoisier (1770s–1790s) and the early-nineteenth-century revolutions in geology, biology, and physics were, in this view, part of the same long transformation.
This longer view is supported by the fact that many features we now associate with modern science were products of the nineteenth century: the research university, the research laboratory, the scientific journal in its modern form, the professional scientific society, the academic discipline. By this measure, the Scientific Revolution lasted until at least the 1840s or 1850s.
The Methodological Question
A key issue in deciding when the Scientific Revolution ended is what we take to be the most important feature of the revolution. If the revolution is primarily a conceptual transformation — the replacement of Aristotelian physics by a mathematical-mechanical natural philosophy — then it was largely complete by 1687, when the Principia appeared. If it is primarily an institutional transformation — the growth of a professional class of scientists, supported by state and university — then it was complete only in the nineteenth century. If it is primarily a cultural transformation — the diffusion of the new science to the educated public, the shaping of a new worldview, the integration of science with the wider culture — then it was complete only with the full flowering of the Enlightenment.
Each of these views is defensible, and each illuminates a different aspect of the historical process. The choice between them is, in part, a choice about what we take to be most important about the revolution.
The End of the Revolution in the Lives of the Major Figures
A simpler measure of when the revolution ended is the death of the major figures. The longest-lived of the canonical revolutionaries was Isaac Newton himself, who died in 1727 at the age of eighty-four. By 1727, all of the major figures of the middle phase — Galileo (d. 1642), Descartes (d. 1650), Bacon (d. 1626), Boyle (d. 1691), Huygens (d. 1695), Hooke (d. 1703) — were dead. With Newton’s death, the revolutionary generation was gone, and the new generation that followed — Euler, the Bernoullis, Lavoisier, Laplace, Buffon — workeding within a settled framework rather than constructing it.
A Reasonable Conclusion
A reasonable conclusion is that the Scientific Revolution had no single end-date, but a series of them. The Principia of 1687 marked the end of the revolution’s most dramatic phase. The Opticks of 1704 marked the completion of the new natural philosophy in its experimental form. Newton’s death in 1727 marked the end of the revolutionary generation. The eighteenth century saw the diffusion of the new learning into Enlightenment culture. The nineteenth century saw the full institutionalization of science as a profession. Each of these endpoints captures a real aspect of the historical process.
The question is not which is the correct date, but what we are trying to understand. For a student of the seventeenth-century science as a body of ideas, 1687 or 1704 is a good endpoint. For a student of the institutionalization of science, the nineteenth century is a better one. For a student of the cultural transformation of early modern Europe, the eighteenth century is the relevant period. The full context is treated in the page on Timeline and Period and in the broader Scientific Revolution overview.