by The Scientific Revolution was a time period when religion, philosophy, and science began to split apart into distinct realms of humanity. Science was re-amped as a structured law based off physical proof, unlike the predeceasing natural philosophers that simply thought about their interpretations of the world and came to conclusions about it. In comparison to other significant revolutions such as the French or American revolution, the scientific one didn’t involve a war or drastic changes in thinking. It was a time period in which scientists began to gravitate more towards raw proof based conclusions than opinions from personal preferences, which led to many revolutionary inventions and ideas that seeded more scientific revolutions and future industries.
The Scientific Revolution happened through the 16th and 17th centuries during which technology was drastically different compared to today. And that can directly be attributed to the Scientific Revolution. The reason for this was in part because of some discoveries and inventions that happened during the revolution but mostly because the scientific method of induction came into existence. Scientists realized that the medieval methods of science were outdated and didn’t give precise information, so they sought to develop a system of reasoning that involved provable experiments that offered undeniable evidence.
Evangelista Torricelli, a scientist during the early 17th century performed a revolutionary experiment that challenged natural perception of the world with scientific proof. Torricelli challenged Galileo’s idea of the vacuum force pulling water through a pump with the proposition that all the air in the world has weight, and it actually pushes the water up instead. Torricelli devised an experiment to prove his hypothesis, which had a glass tube filled with mercury inverted over a plate. The mercury poured out of the tube until the atmospheric pressure on the liquid outside the tube was equal to the mercury pressure inside the tube. This caused the mercury to be suspended in the tube and create a vacuum at the top. Unlike a pump which has a human pull on it creating a vacuum, Torricelli had the mercury create a vacuum on its own proving that atmospheric pressure is what causes liquids to move up tubes rather than a “vacuum force”. Galileo, prior to the scientific revolution based his theory off what he perceived, but Torricelli proved his theory with evidence that couldn’t be denied. This experiment marked a huge milestone in the development of the scientific method.
The Scientific Revolution heralded discoveries and inventions, like the idea of the sun at the center of the universe and the telescope, but the biggest contribution to history this time period offered was the change in scientific reasoning. Scientists to this day follow the scientific method introduced during the 16th and 17th centuries. Scientists today use this method of reasoning even for vast and complex ideas like relativity and the origins of the universe like the Big Bang Theory. Even though the Scientific Revolution didn’t have ground shattering battles or governmental reforms, it shifted the way the scientific, religious, and philosophical communities think and co-exist with each other.