by This week, we talked about the concept of scientific revolution and what did mean to the past society. As the period of scientific revolution goes, it usually indicates the interval of time between 16th and 18th century when the society was undergoing a dramatic change in both the knowledge of science and the philosophy of it. While the others are talking about the effect of scientific revolution on the societal structures and norms, I see scientific revolution as more of a direct proof of the ideology proposed by an author of our former reading-Popper. As Popper once said in the reading, the crucial characteristics that distinct real science from other non-science matters are falsifiability, refutability, and testability, and this is exactly how scientific revolution benefited the world, which is by allowing science to become challengeable .
Before scientific revolution, the most widely accepted scientific system is Aristotelian Philosophy. This system was once viewed as the final and most well-explained way of understanding nature, cosmos and our surroundings, and no other scientists, or philosophers, thought of advancing it. In fact, at that time, science and religion were so tight to each other that the action of trying to advance science could be considered as a major assault to the church. This is why scientific revolution is so unprecedented for which some brave scientists came out and tell the world their discoveries which greatly shook the Aristotelian Philosophy.
When talking about the discoveries related to cosmos, we would first think about Galileo Galilei, who invented telescope to observe the movement of stars and did the famous “Pisa Tower Experiment”. However, Nicolaus Copernicus, the proposer of The Copernican System, actually laid out the ground for Galileo’s astronomical and physical research.
Copernicus proposed a theory that described son as the center of the cosmic system; the earth orbits around the son; and moon orbits around the earth. Before Copernicus, the world believes that earth is the immobile center of the universe and that every other planet rotates around the earth. This was both concluded from people’s common senses which according to their perspectives, the earth didn’t move, and the stars moved and from some philosophers who wanted to think earth as a unique planet. These reasons led to the fact that even though The Copernican System is correct, it wasn’t widely supported the time when it was proposed. After Galilei made his observation using the telescope, he continued to find new evidences to prove that the earth is actually rotating around the sun.
With his efforts, more people started to believe in his theories and the final confirmation happened when the first astronaut came to the space.
The above-mentioned example is just one case of how scientific knowledge was challenged and advance during the scientific revolution, and cases similar to this one happened a lot during this time, which granted this period a name called “scientific revolution”. It is because of these scientists who are brave enough to challenge the outdated believes so that we are able to learn new knowledge from a more theory-based scientific system. In another way, this proves how important are the characteristics of falsifiability, refutability, and testability to real science as they enable scientists to discover mistakes in the previous theories and replace them with the modified versions. Without these ideas in mind, it might not be possible for science to develop as fast as it was.