Scientific Revolution: Power Over Progress

Power over Progress

During the time of the scientific revolution during the 1500 and 1600’s, there was a significant change in the way that people viewed and thought about the world around them. With the revolution came the radical thought that the world could be made sense of by using mathematical and scientific laws, and that the world as people knew it could be shaped, rationalized, and managed by people. This, of course, changed the mindset of some people as people began to start thinking analytically and scientifically about their world to explain occurring phenomena instead of looking to and relying on religion and the Church. People, and specifically scientists and great thinkers of the revolution, broke away from widely accepted ideas based on ancient views

An example of how the church did this is the story of Galileo Galilei.
Galileo was a 17th century Italian scientist and scholar who is today most commonly known for his groundbreaking discoveries in astronomy, which still contribute to physics and astronomy today. In 1609, he learned of a new invention by the Dutch, the telescope. At this time, the telescope’s intended use was for sailing, and to help people see distant ships and land while at sea. However, Galileo was fascinated by the telescope for another reason and built his own telescope for his purpose, to observe the sky. And so, with his telescope he observed many things and bodies in space, including the orbit of several of Jupiter’s moons around Jupiter. He noticed that the movement of the moons was the same as the planets that orbited around the sun.Galileo then concluded that, as an earlier scientist Copernicus theorized, Earth and other planets did