Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution: A Comparative Study

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Scientific Revolution The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the 17th and 18th centuries. It concentrated on reason, logic, and freedom over blind faith. During this time more and more people reject absolute authority of the church and state. The driving force of the enlightenment across Europe and England came from a small group of thinkers and writers that are known today as “philosophes.” The English Enlightenment differed from other European countries, like France. England had many discoveries in manufacturing, literature, plays, and landscaping, but the advances in sciences were probably one of the important. This period of time was coined as the Scientific Revolution. The most …show more content…

The first record of the movement of the planets was produced by Nicolaus Copernicus. He proposed that the earth was the center of everything, which the term is called geocentric. Kepler challenged the theory that the sun was the center of the earth and proposed that the sun was the center of everything; this term is referred to as heliocentric. Kepler’s heliocentric theory was accepted by most people and is accepted in today’s society. One of Kepler’s friends was a famous person named Galileo. Galileo is known for improving the design and the magnification of the telescope. With improvement of the telescope Galileo could describe the craters of the moon and the moons of Jupiter. Galileo also created the number for acceleration of all free falling objects as 9.8 meters per second. Galileo’s and Kepler’s theories were not approved by all people. Their theories contradicted verses in the bible, so the protestant church was extremely skeptical of both Galileo and Kepler’s …show more content…

Antoni and Hook were known for the development of the microscope. Before Antoni improved the microscope, the microscope could only magnify objects 20 or 30 times their natural size. Antoni, a Dutch lens-maker, learned to grind a lens that magnified over 200 times. One of Antoni’s inspirations came from a publication by Robert Hooke’s book Micrographia. In this book the term cell was used to describe the basic unit of a structure in plants and animal life. Hooker wrote about his observations through various lenses. Newton was the most important figure in the scientific revolution because of his book the Principia. In this publication Newton describes the universe and its guidelines. In this he created the universal law of gravity and its mathematical equation. He demonstrates that every object exerts an attraction to a greater or lesser degree on all objects. The Principia led to the creation of the Royal Society in

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