Arguments have been made that the Scientific Revolution is not actually very scientific. Whether or not the changes in sciences were actually revolutionary has been brought into question and whether revolutionary changes were scientific has also been examined. As a quantitative minded human being, I argue that the Scientific Revolution was certainly scientific and that the concept of science was revolutionized from an art form as a form of explanation for what we see around us to an experimentally and math based explanation for the description of the world that we observe.
As Aristotle said, “All people by nature desire to know.” Many early scientists certainly desired to know but did not have the tools to mathematically or experimentally describe what they were seeing. For this reason, the concept of science at the beginning of the scientific revolution is very different from the concept of science now. Early scientists used analogical reasoning, and aspects of the world such as beauty or other reasons that seem absurd as explanations today, to describe what they were seeing and to support their hypotheses. Because the notion of science is a moving target, we need to be understanding that what may be considered superstitions or a crazy line of reasoning today may have been perfectly acceptable truisms in the past.
It is also extremely important to note that this should certainly be viewed as a revolution as many people would argue against that fact. Many parallels can be drawn between the Scientific Revolution and political revolutions. In both cases, an establishment is ousted, there is generally a radical break and then a new system put in place. There are also some differences between the two, such as the Scientific Revolution lacking violence and was not as sudden as many political upheavals.
I don’t think that a revolution needs to be sudden, I believe that as long as something was revolutionized in the process, the period of time should be characterized as a revolution. During the scientific revolution, Aristotle’s way of characterizing and thinking about the natural sciences was questioned, and ultimately he was replaced by three new scientists, Descartes, Galileo and Bacon. While Aristotle’s understanding of the natural world is still important even today, most of his thinking was ousted or improved upon by the three previous aforementioned scientists, giving each of the three a portion of the importance that Aristotle’s name had originally borne.
The scientific revolution is particularly interesting because it also revolutionized our definition of science in general as well as the way that we prove and describe findings. Science, which was originally closer to an art form, was transformed by revolutionary thinkers to a provable, quantitative subject that allowed us to further characterize our world past simple observations such as the beauty of the solar system or assumptions regarding the heavens. In short, the scientific revolution was revolutionary in so many ways. The contributing thinkers were revolutionary, the definition of science was revolutionized and the applications of science were also revolutionized to be more advanced and explanatory.