Sir Francis Bacon Biography In 1620, around the time that people first began to look through microscopes, an English politician named Sir Francis Bacon developed a method for philosophers to use that helped figure out how true knowledge was. While Bacon agreed with medieval thinkers that humans relied too much on what their senses told them, he also realized that people's sensory experiences provided the best possible means of making sense of the world. Because humans could incorrectly interpret anything they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, or felt, Bacon insisted that people must doubt everything and never assume the truth. Testing hypotheses In order to test potential truths, or hypotheses, Bacon created a method where scientists set up experiments to use nature and attempt to prove their hypotheses wrong. For example, in order to test the idea that sickness came from things outside of the body, Bacon argued that scientists should expose healthy people to outside influences such as coldness, wetness, or other sick people to discover if any of these outside variables resulted in more people getting sick. Knowing that many different causes for sickness might be missed by humans who are unable or unwilling to perceive them, Bacon insisted that these experiments must be repeated before truth could be known: a scientist must show that patients exposed to a specific variable more often got sick again, and again, and again. Importance of the printing press Advances in the ability to share new ideas by making standard letters, numbers, and diagrams to be printed many times allowed for an higher level of cooperation among philosophers who could now build on each other's ideas over long periods of time. Astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo began to share and build upon their experiments, and people who wanted to reform religion began to publicize new Protestant ideas. In a mutually beneficial relationship, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution encouraged philosophers to discover all they could about nature as a way to learn more about God. The church disliked this because they wanted to be the only source of truth. A direct engagement with nature
Artisans and craftspeople soon began engaging in the new natural philosophy, representing the fact that a huge shift in what was considered evidence for truth was in the process of happening. Not only did Renaissance artisans create lenses to see, tools to measure, and artworks to look like the natural world, but by the 16th century, they began to publish philosophical essays arguing that through the copying and reproduction of nature in arts, they were able to create a direct experience with nature. Rather than taking knowledge from ancient sources, they argued that true knowledge came from direct experience. Alchemists (Chemists) made it a priority to have direct engagement with nature. In using fire to divide elements into their "smallest" components and discovering that there were more than four of them alchemists helped spread the new idea that observation of nature itself, rather than relying on old and outdated ideas was the best basis for knowledge. The Royal Society These new ideas became even more important with the work of Francis Bacon. In his work as a politician, he called for the development of an institution that would organize all knowledge gained through observation. After a long delay caused by a civil war and the execution of King Charles I, the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded in 1660. A gentleman's club composed of aristocrats, the Royal Society promoted Bacon's principles of exact observation and measurement of experiments in its periodical, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, generally credited as being the first scientific journal. Once Bacon's ideas about experimentation and observation came to be accepted, people began using them to make money off of nature. The study of nature came to be less about changing traditional attitudes and beliefs and more about making money and improving the economy. By the end of the 1700s, the Scientific Revolution led into the 1st Industrial Revolution that transformed the daily lives of people around the world. Western society has been moving forward on Bacon's model for the past three hundred years. Galileo Galilei Biography
His full name was Galileo Galilei and he was an Italian scientist who opened the eyes of the world to a new way of thinking about how our solar system works and astronomy in general. For many years scientists believed that the solar system revolved around the Earth. But Galileo was the first scientist to prove that this wasn t actually correct, in fact the solar system revolved around the sun. Pretty clever man he was indeed. He also invented an improved telescope so that he could gaze far into space. He was the first to see Jupiter s moons and then realised that our moon was covered full of craters. He was brilliant, but besides this, his life wasn t easy. Galileo s Life and Inventions He was born in Pisa, Italy, on the 15th of February 1564. Besides inventing the improved telescopes, he also invented the compass and a thermometer. Galileo decided that he wanted to be a doctor and started to do a medical degree at the University of Pisa but never finished. He ran out of money, and decided that maths was what he was most interested in. We say he invented the improved telescope but what do we mean? Originally telescopes only had 3 x magnifications, and he built one that had about 30 x magnifications. Wow, that s a big difference. No wonder he could gaze far off into space. With these telescopes, he could see the skies like they d never been seen before. In 1610 he saw 4 objects that surrounded Jupiter but he knew they weren t stars. They actually turned out to be Jupiter s four largest satellite moons. Galileo and Kepler s Theory No one actually believed him about his discovery and he just couldn t convince people that he d found these moons. Every time he discovered something new, people never believed him and they were debated a lot at the time. Galileo would absolutely not believe Kepler s theory that the moon caused the tides, instead he believed that it was because of how the Earth rotated. So this one was wrong, even super smart people can make mistakes! The Geocentric model of the universe, where Earth was believed to be the centre of the universe, with everything moving around it, was quashed by Galileo s work along with other scientists. They came up with the heliocentric model. Heliocentric was more accurate and means that everything orbits around the sun. The Catholic Church was not happy at all, as it was so different to their beliefs. They felt so strongly about it that they made him withdraw many of his ideas and put him under house arrest, which meant he was a prisoner in his own home for the rest of his life. That is not cool!
Galileo Musician, Teacher, Scientist! Did you know that he was a very good musician and a brilliant student too! As we said he went to medical school to become a doctor, but wasn t all that keen on it. From there he went and got a job as a teacher. During his time, there weren t really scientists as we know them today, they didn t run tests or experiments to test out their new ideas. But Galileo was different, he wanted to test all the principles and try and see them happening in the real world. He basically started what is now known as the scientific method, test, test and test again. Galileo s Experiments He decided to run an experiment on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He went to the top and dropped two items that were different weights, but were the same size and shape. He believed that the heavier item would land first, but it didn t. They both landed at the same time. However, no one really knows if he did this as the only person who really knew was his secretary. Some people weren t keen on his experiments at all and wanted all their views to be just as they believed in them. In 1592, he moved the University of Padua, and here he was allowed to experiment and talk about his new ideas. Cool for him. Galileo still carried on writing while he was under house arrest, and later on in life he became blind. He died on January 8, 1642. Poor thing! After Galileo died, the Catholic Church decided that Galileo wasn t all that bad after all and said that they regretted how he was treated. That was a bit late! A year before his death he came up with a pendulum design, which was used for keeping time. Galileo never got married. The middle finger of Galileo s right hand is currently on exhibition at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. Not sure we want to see that! Johannes Kepler Biography When Johannes Kepler was born in December, 1571 scientists believed that planets in the solar system moved in circular orbits around the Earth. The uncommon problem was solved by the use of miniature circles test epicycles to planetary paths. But Kepler not only strongly defended the idea that planets orbit the sun, he also discovered that their paths were not perfect circles. His descriptions of the movement of planets became known as Kepler s laws.
Johannes Kepler Facts Born in December of 1571, young Kepler was a sickly child of poor parents. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Tübingen, where he studied to become a Lutheran minister. While there, he studied the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, who taught that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth, even though he had no observations or evidence to prove it. In 1596, Kepler wrote the first defense of the Copernican system. This was a dangerous thing to do, given that in 1539, Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran church, called the theory false and the Catholic church thought the idea of Earth revolving around the sun went directly against the teachings of the church. In search of the most detailed notes about the paths of the planets, Kepler contacted astronomer Tycho Brahe. A wealthy Danish nobleman, Brahe built an observatory in Prague where he tracked the motions of the planets and kept the most accurate observations of the solar system at the time. In 1600, Brahe invited Kepler to come work with him. Brahe, however, proved to be suspicious and unwilling to share his detailed notes with his assistant. Instead, he assigned Kepler to solve the mystery of Mars, one of the most puzzling problems in astronomy at the time. Ironically, the detailed records of the challenging planet were the tools Kepler needed to understand how the solar system worked. When Brahe died in 1601, Kepler managed to find and use Brahe's observations before his family could use them to their financial benefit. Kepler's laws The Mars problem, which Kepler said he would solve in eight days, took nearly eight years. Astronomers had been struggling for a long time to figure out why Mars appeared to walk backwards across the night sky. No model of the solar system not even Copernicus' could solve the problem. Using Brahe's observations, Kepler realized that the planets traveled in "stretched out" circles known as ellipses. The sun didn't sit exactly at the center of their orbit, but instead lay off to the side, at one of the two points known as the focus. Some planets, such as Earth, had an orbit that was very close to a circle, but the orbit of Mars was one of the furthest away from a perfect circle. The fact that planets travel in elliptical paths is known as Kepler's First Law.
Mars appeared to move backward when Earth, on an inner orbit, came from behind the red planet, then caught up and passed it. Copernicus had suggested that observations made from a moving Earth (rather than a centrally located one) could be a cause of the backwards motion, but the perfect circular orbits he posited still required epicycles to account for the paths of the planets. Kepler realized that two planets, traveling on ellipses, would create the appearance of the red planet's backward motion in the night sky. Kepler also struggled with changes in the speed of the planets. He realized that a planet moved slower when it was farther away from the sun than it did when it was closer. Once he understood that planets traveled in ellipses, he determined that an invisible line connecting the sun to a planet covered an equal amount of area over the same amount of time. He called this, his Second Law, along with his first, which he published in 1609. Kepler's Third Law was published a decade later, and recognized that the relationship between the period of two planets the time they take to orbit the sun is connected to their distance from the sun. Specifically, the square of the ratio of the period of two plants is equal to the cube of the ratio of their radius. While his first two laws focus on the specifics of a single planet's movement, his third is a comparison between the orbit of two planets. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Biography Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was born in Delft on 24 October 1632. In 1648, van Leeuwenhoek was apprenticed to a textile merchant, which is where he probably first found out about magnifying glasses, which were used in the textile trade to count thread densities to make sure that each piece of fabric was made correctly. At age 20, he returned to Delft and set himself up as a linen-draper. He became wealthy and was appointed chamberlain to the sheriffs of Delft in 1660, and becoming a surveyor nine years later. In 1668, van Leeuwenhoek paid his first and only visit to London, where he probably saw a copy of Robert Hooke's 'Micrographia' (1665) which included pictures of textiles that would have been of interest to him. In 1673, he reported his first observations - bee mouthparts and stings, a human lice and a fungus - to the Royal Society. He was elected a member of the society in 1680 and continued his association for the rest of his life. In 1676, van Leeuwenhoek observed water closely and was surprised to see tiny organisms - the first bacteria observed by man. His letter announcing this discovery caused widespread doubt at the Royal Society but Robert Hooke later repeated the experiment and was able to confirm his discoveries.
As well as being the father of microbiology, van Leeuwenhoek laid the foundations of plant anatomy and became an expert on animal reproduction. He discovered blood cells and microscopic nematodes, and studied the structure of wood and crystals. He also made over 500 microscopes to view specific objects. He also discovered sperm, which he considered one of the most important discoveries of his career, and described the spermatozoa from molluscs, fish, amphibians, birds and mammals, coming to the novel conclusion that fertilisation occurred when the spermatozoa penetrated the egg. Sir Isaac Newton Biography Occupation: Scientist, mathematician, and astronomer Born: January 4, 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England Died: March 31, 1727 in London, England Best known for: Defining the three laws of motion and universal gravitation Isaac Newton is considered one of the most important scientists in history. Even Albert Einstein said that Isaac Newton was the smartest person that ever lived. During his lifetime Newton developed the theory of gravity, the laws of motion (which became the basis for physics), a new type of mathematics called calculus, and made breakthroughs in the area of optics such as the reflecting telescope. Early Life Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, England on January 4, 1643. His father, a farmer who was also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before his birth. His mother remarried when Isaac was three years old and left young Isaac in the care of his grandparents. Isaac attended school where he was an adequate student. At one point his mother tried to take him out of school so he could help on the farm, but Isaac had no interest in becoming a farmer and was soon back at school. Isaac grew up mostly
alone. For the rest of his life he would prefer to work and live alone focused on his writing and his studies. College and Career In 1661, Isaac began to attend college at Cambridge. He would spend much of his life at Cambridge, becoming a professor of mathematics and a fellow of the Royal Society (a group of scientists in England). He eventually was elected to represent Cambridge University as a member of parliament. Isaac had to leave Cambridge from 1665 to 1667 because of the Great Plague. He spent these two years in study and isolation at his home in Woolsthorpe developing his theories on calculus, gravity, and the laws of motion. In 1696 Newton became the warden of the Royal Mint in London. He took his duties seriously and tried to get rid of corruption as well as to reform the currency of England. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703 and was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. The Principia In 1687 Newton published his most important work called the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (which means "Mathematical principals of Natural Philosophy"). In this work he described the three laws of motion as well as the law of universal gravity. This work would go down as one of the most important works in the history of science. It not only introduced the theory of gravity, but defined the principals of modern physics. Scientific Discoveries Isaac Newton made many scientific discoveries and inventions throughout his career. Here is a list of some of the most important and famous ones. Gravity - Newton is probably most famous for discovering gravity. Outlined in the Principia, his theory about gravity helped to explain the movements of the planets and the Sun. This theory is known today as Newton's law of universal gravitation. Laws of Motion - Newton's laws of motion were three fundamental laws of physics that laid the foundation for classical mechanics. Calculus - Newton invented a whole new type of mathematics which he called "fluxions." Today we call this math calculus and it is an important type of math used in advanced engineering and science. Reflecting Telescope - In 1668 Newton invented the reflecting telescope. This type of telescope uses mirrors to reflect light and form an image. Nearly all of the major telescopes used in astronomy today are reflecting telescopes.
Legacy Newton died on March 31, 1727 in London, England. Today, he is considered one of the most influential scientists of all time alongside greats such as Albert Einstein, Aristotle, and Galileo. Interesting Facts about Isaac Newton He studied many classic philosophers and astronomers such as Aristotle, Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, and Galileo. Legend has it that Newton got his inspiration for gravity when he saw an apple fall from a tree on his farm. He wrote his thoughts down in the Principia at the urging of his friend (and famous astronomer) Edmond Halley. Halley even paid for the book's publication. He once said of his own work "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."