17th Century Flashcards
Roots of the scientific revolution.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 resulted in a large number of refugees fleeing to Europe, bringing with them Greek and Roman books that had been archived in Constantinople, unused for centuries.
This, and the invention of the printing press in about 1450 accelerated the pace of learning in Renaissance Europe.
Science entered a new era with the Renaissance, which began in 14th century Italy. By the 17th century it had extended and blossomed throughout most of Europe.
This was a momentous century in which science moved from a state of knowledge that was in many ways little more advanced than third century BC Greece to a much more advanced, sophisticated position, paving the way for the industrial revolution in the 1700s, and many more famous scientists.
Galileo Galilei
1600: principle of inertia
1600: ballistic parabolic motion. Tartaglia had invented ballistics, refuted Aristotle, but projectile path short of a parabola.
1609 – Galileo Galilei observes Jupiter’s four largest moons, disproving church dogma that all movement in the universe is centered on Earth
• 1632 – Galileo Galilei finds that the laws of motion are the same in all inertial reference frames.
Johannes Kepler 1571 to 1630.
Discovered the solar system’s planets follow elliptical paths
Identified the tides are caused mainly by the moon; proved how logarithms work;
Discovered the inverse square law of light intensity;
His laws of planetary motion led Newton to his law of gravitation.
1609 – Johannes Kepler publishes his first two laws of planetary motion showing that planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun.
1619 – Kepler publishes his third law of planetary motion relating the time taken for a planet to orbit the sun with its distance from the sun. *
1628 – Kepler publishes his planetary tables, the calculations for which would have taken years without Napier’s logarithms
Boyle. Robert Boyle.
- 1661 – Robert Boyle writes The Skeptical Chymist, with his manifesto for the science of chemistry, explaining the roles of elements and compounds, and telling scientists they must carefully observe, record and report scientific data.
- 1662 – Robert Boyle publishes his law of pressure and volume in gases.
Mathematically, Boyle’s law can be stated as
P ∝ 1/V
PxV = k.
P1*V1 = P2*V2
The equation states that the product of pressure and volume is a constant for a given mass of confined gas as long as the temperature is constant.
• 1675 – Robert Boyle shows that electric repulsion and attraction act in a vacuum
Robert Hooke
• c1660 – Hooke’s Law : The extension of a spring or elastic material is directly proportional to the applied force.
Hooke built a compound microscope with a new, screw-operated focusing mechanism he had designed. Previously, people needed to move the specimen to get it in focus. He further improved the microscope with lighting.
• 1664 – Robert Hooke uses a microscope to observe the cellular basis of life.
Micrographia was one of the most important scientific books ever written, because it revealed a new world that people had never imagined could exist. Our knowledge of microbiology, quantum physics, and nanotechnology can all be traced back to Hooke’s Micrographia and the path some scientists were inspired to follow after seeing the micro-world Hooke had drawn.
Discovered fungi micro mushrooms. Discovered plant cells. Even in fossils.
Controversially claimed that prior living species went extinct.
Curator of Experiments for Royal Society.
Had primacy disputes with other scientists especially Newton. Hooke thought Newton had not acknowledged Hooke’s ideas about gravity sufficiently.
Died wealthy due to work as an architect.
Quote: By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding.
Newton Major hits.
*1665 – Isaac Newton invents calculus – the mathematics of change – without which we could not understand the modern world. He keeps it secret, using it to develop theories which he eventually publishes in 1687.
*1666 – Isaac Newton discovers that light is made up of all of the colors of the rainbow, which are refracted by different amounts in a glass prism.
- 1667 – Isaac Newton builds the world’s first reflecting telescope.
- 1684 – Gottfried Leibniz publishes his calculus, which he discovered independently of Isaac Newton. He has been working on calculus for the past decade.
- 1687 – Isaac Newton publishes one of the most important scientific books ever: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, revolutionizing physics and our understanding of gravity and motion.
René Descartes
1596 – 1650
Dutch
René Descartes invented analytical geometry and introduced skepticism as an essential part of the scientific method. He is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers in history.
His analytical geometry was a tremendous conceptual breakthrough, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. Descartes showed that he could solve previously unsolvable problems in geometry by converting them into simpler problems in algebra. He represented the horizontal direction as x and the vertical direction as y. This concept is now indispensable in mathematics and other sciences.
Published his ideas in Discours de la mèthode (Discussion of the Method), La Gèomètrie (Geometry), Les Mètèores (Meteorology), and La Dioptrique (Optics).
“I think therefore I am.”
This could also be expressed as:
“I can think, therefore I exist.”
