The Scientific Revolution

Catalog description

(History 140A is 5 units; History 40A is 3 units.) The modern sciences trace their origins to the 16th and 17th centuries, when natural knowledge took on dramatically new shapes at the hands of people such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. These figures and their contemporaries proposed radically different ways to study, understand and explain the cosmos, and they also founded new institutions for the purpose: for example, the Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiment) in Florence; the Royal Society in London; and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Through these developments, the natural sciences began to assume their modern form in several dimensions: theoretical, experimental, methodological and institutional. The course will study these origins of modern science in relation to the political, imperial, religious, social, and cultural context of early modern Europe.