Natalie DiMichele In our society today, individual thought is highly valued and essential for progress in the world. However, there was a time when thinking outside of the box could’ve led to eternal damnation. During the Middle Ages, everyone’s understanding of the world and our place in it was taught to them by the Catholic Church. Very few people challenged the Catholic Church’s beliefs due to a lack of education and fear of the Church’s harsh punishments. After the emergence of the Renaissance, the cultural rebirth of society, there was a revival of knowledge and a change in thought. The Scientific Revolution also began during this period and was a huge change in thought that started in 1543. The Revolution highlighted the importance of …show more content…
They started to suspect that absolute monarchs did not have a divine right to be in their positions and thought about another way of distributing power. Nicolai Copernicus was one of the first people to use logic and reasoning to challenge the old way of thinking. Document one is a model by Nicolai Copernicus released in 1543. The model depicts a heliocentric or sun-centered solar system. The sun is in the middle and the planets orbit in a circle around it. The Copernican theory directly challenged the idea that was widely accepted by the Church. That idea was an Earth-centered universe that Aristotle and Ptolemy had created nearly 2,000 years before. The heliocentric theory took nearly a century to be accepted by everyone as the Catholic Church heavily disagreed with it. In regards to forming a new government, enlightenment thinkers criticized the government rather than saying that it was wrong. Document six is a contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau that states: “The individual member alienates himself totally to the whole community together with all his rights.” Rousseau’s main idea is that everyone should feel safe, happy, and equal even if it means sacrificing personal joy for the good of society. If these things are not present then the community does not work. The contract …show more content…
This is called the scientific method and has been used not only in fields of science but also in politics and government. Document three is a model of the scientific method from 1999. The model consists of the 7 steps of this process. One: state the problem, two: collect information, three: form a hypothesis, four: experiment, five: record and analyze data, six: state a conclusion, seven: repeat the steps. The method was built using logic and reason to get from one step to the next. The seven steps ensure that the experiment has accurate results and is a guide that all scientists use to test theories. This was essential to further think about why things happen rather than using God to explain them. Enlightenment thinkers used a similar method to solve the problem of absolute monarchs. Most believed that power shouldn't be in the hands of one but should belong to the people. Document seven is a book by Montesquieu. It states, "the political liberty of the subject is a tranquility of mind, arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite for the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another." Montesquieu believed that power should be divided into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The government as it was had one monarch in charge of all three branches. For life liberty
Rousseau’s beliefs coincided with the beliefs of other Enlightenment thinkers. This is shown when he writes, “Duty and interest thus equally require the two contracting parties [the people and the government] to aid each other mutually” (Document 3). In that period of history, it was typical for people to be ruled by a monarch and they had very little say, if any, in the laws and policies that impacted their day to day life. Rousseau felt that the system was outdated and it made citizens feel as if they were living in someone else’s home rather than their own, so he theorized that by fabricating a system in which the government and the people are forced to work together, it creates a sense of unity and equality. This works because “ … an offense against one of its members is an offense against the body politic.
The Scientific Method is a way to answer and ask scientific questions by creating a hypothesis and creating an experiment. The steps of the scientific method include: asking a question, background research, creating a hypothesis, test your hypothesis by doing an experiment, analyzing the data, drawing a conclusion, and finally publishing your results. There are many places in the book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston in which steps of the scientific method are used, the first one I found was during the Kitum Cave expedition. In the Kitum Cave expedition, Eugene Johnson set up an experiment to test if the source of the virus that infected Peter Cardinal and Charles Monet was inside Kitum Cave.
In Steven Shapin’s book, The Scientific Revolution, he described the massive scientific changes that occurred from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries. Shapin utilizes the scientists and their findings to demonstrate the changes that affected Western civilization. He describes his theory of the Scientific Revolution as he proves that the world has always had scientific advances. Steven Shapin states his thesis which influenced the modern world, that the Scientific Revolution did not happen during a single time period through the use of the three essential questions: What was known, How was it known, and What was the Knowledge for.
The Enlightenment helped to shape the ideas of popular sovereignty, natural rights, and separation of powers in the United States Constitution. To start, the Enlightenment introduced the idea of Popular Sovereignty. Popular Sovereignty is the idea that the majority of people should have the biggest say in the government. John Locke believed that the people should be the ones to make the decisions for their government. The people are the ones that are impacted the most by the government, so they should have the biggest say in it.
In his publication, Copernicus proposed a something that revolutionary at the time. He proposed that the Earth, in fact, was not the center of the universe, but that the sun was at the center and that Earth was just one numerous other planets that rotate around it. This theory was revolutionary, because most of the scientific knowledge at the time was based on the thoughts of classical thinkers. Although many rejected Copernicus’s findings, there were others who believed Copernicus’s theory to be
Why does an apple fall from a tree? Does the Earth revolve around the sun or the moon? Both of these were valid questions that people had, and were loosely answered before the Scientific Revolution changed our system of beliefs and our way of thinking. The Scientific Revolution during the mid-16th century through the 17th century was a time of deductive reasoning that incorporated challenging ideas about the environment, technology, and science. The relationship of these topics and our understanding of them were greatly changed after the Scientific Revolution.
The Renaissance: A Legacy for the Ages "Knowledge is power." This famous quote by Francis Bacon is one of the defining principles of the Renaissance. During this period, Europeans began to place a renewed emphasis on learning and education. They rediscovered the classical learning of ancient Greece and Rome, and they began to explore new scientific and technological ideas. The Renaissance was a time of great intellectual and cultural change, and it laid the foundations for the modern world.
The scientific method is defined as procedures to pursuit knowledge while recognizing the formulation of a problem. This method contains six different steps to obtain a theory. Step one make an observations, step two form a question, step three form a hypothesis, step four conduct an experiment, step five analyze data, and finally step six is conclusion. These steps are documented very well so that other scientists researching the same field can refer back to the documentation. Making an observation or asking a question is step one in the scientific method.
The Scientific Revolution were series of events that sparked an interest in modern science today as we know it. The Scientific Revolution occurred during the 15th,16th, and 17th century and it was so revolutionary because before the Scientific Revolution, science was not given much thought. It was just what the Roman and Greek philosophers said and they would be correct, even if it was anything but correct. The Scientific Revolution all started when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and ran into a whole different continent that wasn’t even on the map.
Clameiry Perez Mr.Cardona Ms.Wildman April, 2017 SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION The scientific revolution is the emergence of modern science during modern periods. The "Scientific Revolution" refers to historical changes in thought & belief, beginning with Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), who asserted a heliocentric (sun centered) cosmos, and ended with Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Was there such a thing as the Scientific Revolution you may ask yourself, or even what do historians mean when they speak of the Scientific Revolution? The Scientific Revolution provides an excellent exercise for thinking about how historical periodizations emerge, develop, and mature.
In this paper I will discuss Jean-Jacques Rousseau philosophy on politics, some of which are common with America’s political system and some of which are not. Rousseau’s philosophy regarding slavery, equality and the right to assemble are common with elements found in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Sovereignty as defined by Rousseau is a collective grouping of all citizens, who have absolute power and who express the general will of the people. Their purpose is to express and protect the common good of the people.
All of these new ideas and theories did not come easily, due to the controversies it had with the church. The use of a sun-centered universe seemed impossible and evil in the eye of the church, for the teaching of a geocentric universe had continuously been preached through scriptures and masses over centuries. The church believed that “this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God,” the art being science and its factual truth rather than religious explanations (4). The church feared that with science less and less would believe in miracles and works of God and solely rely on science as its source of education. After presenting his heliocentric model, Copernicus stated “they [religious men] will cry out at once and say that I and my theory should be rejected” (2).
He also came to the conclusion by watching planets for days and months that the planets have a irregular path way, and they don’t all circle around at the same time and place. An Italian philosopher Galileo Galilei was born in 1564. He didn’t trust the universal geocentric theory of the planets and heavens as well. Humanity in the 1500’s believed that the Pope when spoke was for God through a heavenly connection, and to go against the church was to go against God, which was unheard of to do. Galileo was the one who invented the telescope and began studying the stars and galaxy and noticed changes with the stars and planets.
The scientific revolution took place during 16th and 17th centuries whereby historical changes in beliefs and intellectual thoughts took place. The changes were evidenced in two different areas such as biology (anatomy and physiology) and astronomy (the solar system). However, the revolution was such a main innovative to man since it changed the way people view the world of nature. The scientific revolution emerged from several intellectuals; Galilei, Brahe, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton (Mitchell, p 18). For example, Newton developed law of gravity.
The Scientific Method Contrary to popular belief, we don’t necessarily need to be scientists to make use of the Scientific Method. We utilize this method throughout everyday life. The Scientific Method is the principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation of testing a hypothesis [Merriam-Webster]. There are five key components to the Scientific Method: making an observation, forming a question, forming a hypothesis, organizing an experiment, and drawing a conclusion.