What intellectual and social changes occurred as a result of the Scientific Revolution?
The creation of a new science was not accomplished by a handful of brilliant astronomers working alone. Scholars in many fields — medicine, chemistry, and botany, among others — used new methods to seek answers to long-standing problems, sharing their results in a community that spanned Europe. At the same time, monarchs and entrepreneurs launched explorations to uncover and understand the natural riches of newly conquered empires around the globe.
| Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) | On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543); theorized that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the galaxy |
| Paracelsus (1493–1541) | Swiss physician and alchemist who pioneered the use of chemicals and drugs to address illness |
| Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) | On the Structure of the Human Body (1543) |
| Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) | Built observatory and compiled data for the Rudolphine Tables, a new table of planetary data |
| Francis Bacon (1561–1626) | Advocated experimental method, formalizing theory of inductive reasoning known as empiricism |
| Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) | Used telescopic observation to provide evidence for Copernican hypothesis; experimented to formulate laws of physics, such as inertia |
| Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) | Used Brahe’s data to mathematically prove the Copernican hypothesis; his new laws of planetary motion united for the first time natural philosophy and mathematics; completed the Rudolphine Tables in 1627 |
| William Harvey (1578–1657) | Discovery of circulation of blood (1628) |
| René Descartes (1596–1650) | Used deductive reasoning to formulate the theory of Cartesian dualism |
| Robert Boyle (1627–1691) | Boyle’s law (1662) governing the pressure of gases |
| Isaac Newton (1642–1727) | Principia Mathematica (1687); set forth the law of universal gravitation, synthesizing previous findings of motion and matter |