Science and Technology - AP European History

Sir Francis Bacon is the man who pioneered the scientific method. It was meant to serve as a pathway for all scientists to objectively observe, and theorize reasons for, natural phenomena in the world.

Galileo was the man who championed the idea of Heliocentricity. While he often gets credit for first proposing the theory, it was actually Copernicus who first proposed the theory. Galileo was an ardent believer in the theory though, and pushed it publicly, causing the backlash from the Catholic Church which made him even more famous.

Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo were all notable astronomers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Collectively they did a great deal to advance our understanding of the Earth’s place in the solar system and in the universe. Copernicus was the first to prove, mathematically (his work improved upon by Kepler), that the sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system. For their efforts, all three of these men had to fear intense church retribution when publishing their works.

Copernicus wrote On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in the sixteenth century, and this work was published after his death. This work described a heliocentric model of the universe, in which the sun was posited as the center of the universe, with the planets revolving around it. Copernicus's model implicitly disputed the accuracy of the prevailing scientific model, the Ptolemaic or geocentric model, in which the earth was the center of the universe. Also, note that Copernicus's model did not recognize that planetary motion was elliptical.

In 1600, William Gilbert published his groundbreaking work on magnetism, specifically in regard to the magnetic nature of the Earth’s atmosphere. This made navigation and the use of compasses far easier and more reliable and allowed European explorers and traders to push further afield and to have much greater faith in the security of their journeys.

All of these people made notable contributions to mankind’s understanding of the nature of the solar system and the universe, but the discovery that planets move in elliptical orbits, as opposed to perfect circles as was initially believed, was made by Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century.

Analytical geometry is the study of geometry that employs a coordinate system and marries geometry and algebra in a way previously not understood by European mathematicians. The work was pioneered by René Descartes in his work La Géométrie. It laid the foundation for the invention of calculus a few decades later by Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz.

For much of history, from the time when Aristotle lived until the Scientific Revolution, it was assumed that light travelled instantaneously. However, Galileo postulated, correctly as it turns out, that all we can deduce is that light travels faster than the speed of sound, but does not necessarily travel instantaneously.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is considered to be the world’s first microbiologist. He greatly improved the capabilities of microscopes, and in doing so, opened up the world of the microscopic to human examination for the first time in human history. Among other things, he is believed to be the first human being to observe single-celled organisms, bacteria, yeast, and blood cells.

Robert Hooke was an English scientist in the seventeenth century who, among other things, pioneered work in the field of microbiology. He was the first man to employ the term “cell” to describe the composition of organisms that he observed under a microscope.

The first reliable mercury thermometer was invented by the German scientist Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714. The scale used to measure temperature was later altered by the Swedish scientist Anders Celsius, who set the freezing point of water at zero and the boiling point at one hundred and created the Celsius temperature measurement system. Lord Kelvin is famous for inventing the Kelvin scale that sets its zero point at absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature attainable before matter becomes completely motionless and devoid of energy.

The Ptolemaic system of the solar system was developed by a classical-era Roman scholar named Claudius Ptolemy. It is more often referred to as the geocentric model of the universe, or the geocentric model of the solar system. It was widely influential throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period as the primary model for understanding the movement of the planets and the sun. According to this model of the solar system, the Earth is at the center and all the other planets, the sun, and the stars revolve around the Earth. This was later disproved by Copernicus, who postulated the heliocentric model of the solar system in which the planets revolve around the sun.

On the Fabric of the Human Body is one of the most influential works on human anatomy in European history. It was written by Andreas Vesalius in the mid-sixteenth century and refuted the long held belief in Galen’s understanding of the “humors” and human blood.

Sir Francis Bacon was an English scientist in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who pioneered the scientific method and greatly emphasized the importance of inductive reasoning as opposed to deductive reasoning. His development of the scientific method is one of the most important steps of the Scientific Revolution and contributed to the massive growth in human understanding of chemistry and physics in the centuries that followed. In the scientific method, the first step is to gather facts and then to conduct unbiased experiments designed to test a certain theory; this differed greatly from the earlier approach of running experiments and then postulating a theory to match the outcome of the test.

Throughout the Scientific Revolution, the Papacy was extremely hostile to any developments that challenged the church’s established doctrine on creation and the nature of the universe. This was particularly true of any revelations to do with astronomy, to the point where Copernicus waited until after his death to have his work on the heliocentric model of the solar system published, and Galileo lived in constant fear of punishment and execution.

Robert Boyle was an Irish chemist who lived during the seventeenth century. He is most widely known for his innovations in the field of chemistry, particularly Boyle’s Law—an equation conveying the inverse relationship between pressure and volume of gas.

CERN was established 1954 on the border between Switzerland and France. It is a pan-European cooperative venture designed to encourage scientific innovation and a pooling of research and resources. It is currently the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and is also where the World Wide Web was implemented.

Copernicus is famed for being the one to come up with the idea of heliocentricity. This means he was the one to first propose the idea that the universe revolved around the Sun rather than around the world. Galileo is often thought of as the father of this idea, but he was actually a follower of Copernicus and he simply popularized the idea.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth century the Italian city-states (Florence, Milan, Pisa, Venice, Genoa, et al.) were the center of trade between Europe and Asia. As the volume of trade grew so too did the interaction between people of various cultures. Middle Eastern mathematics and technology were introduced into European society, as was eastern philosophy.

The “uncertainty principle” states that you can never simultaneously know the position and velocity of an electron; you can only know one or the other at a time. Essentially, if you know how fast it is moving, you do not know where it is, and vice versa. The exact reasons for this are too complicated to go into here, but the important thing to note is that the nature of this discovery is critical to understanding the scientific perspective of the first half of the twentieth century. The absolute faith in the power of science to explain the workings of the universe was being questioned anew, as science was creating more questions than answers.