DESCRIPTION OF INTERACTIVE
Prior to the nineteenth century, the term, "natural philosophy," was commonly used to describe the practice of studying nature. Even before the Pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, philosophers had already begun to ask questions about the true ‘essence’ of things, eschewing the use of religion or mythology to provide the answers.
Like other great thinkers of his period, Aristotle believed that all substances were composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water; however, Aristotle went further, believing that there was a pure, perfect, ‘first element’ that only existed in the heavens and was found in the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The resulting search for this heavenly substance - one that could do everything from cure diseases or change base metals to gold - would contribute greatly to the science of chemistry and the practical aspects of distillation and extraction processes, even if these practices were by alchemists searching for the Philosopher’s Stone.
While none of Hypatia's philosophical writings survive (probably all destroyed with the Library at Alexandria), there is evidence of her impact on mathematics and the science of astronomy.
Famously, she edited the work, On the Conics of Apollonius, which divided cones into different parts by a plane. This concept developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses. Hypatia's work on this important book made these concepts easier to understand; thus, her work survived through many centuries.
Known as the ‘Father of Arabic Chemistry,’ Jābir was a Muslim alchemist best known for a type of arithmology known as the Jabirian corpus. The essence of this method was to balance out the four ‘natures’ in a substance - hot, cold, wet, and dry. Despite allusions to the spiritual nature of metals, Jābir’s work in metallurgy laid the groundwork for other scientists (and pseudoscientists) of the Middle Ages, such as Gerber, to seventeenth century scientists such as Boyle.
Abd al-Rahman Al-Sufi, also known as Azophi, was a medieval astronomer. The first to describe Andromeda's 'nebulosity,' he mapped the southern group of stars first identified by Arab navigators in the Malay Archipelago.
He charted the heavens from his own observations, methodically calculating their magnitudes and luminosity. His book, Kitab al-Kawakib al-Thabit al-Musawwir is important to this day in the study of motion and long period variables.
In a modern context, Hildegard’s science would raise many eyebrows, but almost a millennium ago, her observations made way for a new and more systematic understanding of the natural world.
She was a polymath and wrote broadly on botany, geology, and medicine. Her Physica, a classic text on health and healing, pioneered the case for hygiene in ongoing health, organized taxonomic systems to address causes and cures, expanded on Aristotle's physics, and offered a practical guide to the curative properties of herbs and medicines. Although something of a mystic, her philosophy of "medicine" was Hippocratic (definition: Scientific medicine free from the constraints of philosophical speculation and superstition.) and systematic.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a late Renaissance, early Reformation period astronomer who formulated a heliocentric solar system model of the universe - one that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe.
This was a major event in the history of science. Not only was it a complete paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the centre of the universe, but his model also suggested was that mankind was not the centre of the Universe.
His findings were so controversial that, even though it is speculated that he discovered them sometime between 1508 and 1514, he did not publish them until 1543 when he was on his deathbed.
Galileo Galilei’s observations of nature had long-lasting implications for the study of physics because of the methods that he used, and the use of mathematics to prove them. Galileo’s use of a telescope to prove that Venus circled the sun disputed the Aristotelian doctrine that the Earth was the centre of the universe, and supported the ‘outlawed’ Copernican theory. For this, and other findings, Galileo was accused of heresy twice by the Catholic Church, even though he saw no evidence that Copernican theory contradicted the Bible. Nevertheless, as a devout Catholic, Galileo abided by the Church’s ban on the controversial theory for a number of years. In the end, Galileo could not keep silent, and for this, he was persecuted for the rest of his life for challenging the prevailing worldview.
Considered one of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century’s Scientific Revolution, Sir Isaac Newton developed nearly all of the essential concepts of the scientific discipline of Physics. Indeed, many of the theories contained in his book, Principia, stayed unchallenged until the work of Albert Einstein in the twentieth century.
That being said, later on in his life Newton began to pursue prophecy, scripture, and the study of alchemy - all which seem incongruous for a man who revolutionized science. However, the seventeenth century was still a time of great flux - modern science was still a very new discipline - and many intellectuals grappled with the paradigm shift, especially with regard to religion and the metaphysical pursuit for life’s meaning.
Another member of the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution, Bacon dedicated himself to the restructuring of traditional learning - a mixture of humanism, natural magic, and scholasticism - and argued for a new system based on inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. For this, he has been called the ‘father of empiricism.’
Bacon also proposed that scientists could avoid misleading themselves as they used sceptical and methodical approaches to inquiry - an idea that would later contribute to the theoretical framework of the scientific method.
Descartes’ first publication, Discourse on Method (1637), was a response to the lack of clarity he saw in the world of science, and it became the touchstone of the scientific method. Descartes described how scientific study should use deductive reasoning to test hypotheses - an 'a priori' (definition:A Latin phrase referring to knowledge based on self-evident truths that are already formed or conceived beforehand.) method to discovering infallible knowledge.
As a philosopher, Descartes’ analytic method of thinking focused attention on the problem of how we know - his approach to science is through a lens of epistemology. So while proposing that scientists seek to prove their theories, not relying on the authorities of the past, but through direct and present observation, he was not sufficiently convinced beyond a doubt that these observations were completely reliable because of his concern about the "deception of the senses.” This compelled him to rebuild a new system of truth upon an unquestionable first principle, “I think, therefore I am.’
Boyle lived in an extraordinarily superstitious age, but became a preeminent figure of the seventeenth century scientific revolution, particularly in the field of chemistry. Through his work, Boyle took chemistry out of the realm of alchemy and mysticism, into the discipline of science. He defined elements and compounds, and he coined the new term, ‘chemical analysis.’
While Boyle’s most famous piece of experimental equipment was the vacuum chamber, he is also noted for establishing the First Gas Law. However, his greatest contribution to the scientific revolution is that rather than ‘discover’ something by argument using the rules of logic established by Aristotle, Boyle was the first prominent scientist to perform controlled experiments and publish his work with details concerning procedure, apparatus, and observations.