- Welcome to the University of Wisconsin-Platteville's
College of Liberal Arts and Education Faculty Forum Series.
I'm Dr. Kory Wein, Associate Dean of the college.
It is my great pleasure to introduce
tonight's speaker, Dr. Nancy Turner.
Dr. Turner is a Professor of History at UW-Platteville,
where she has taught since 1996.
She holds a BA degree in History in German,
from the University of Missouri- Columbia,
and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Iowa.
Dr. Turner's area of specialty is Late Medieval History,
with a focus on Christian and non-Christian relations
in the High and Late Middle Ages.
She teaches a variety of courses at UW-Platteville,
but her favorite is her course
on the History of Western Science.
Along with several published articles
on Christian theologians' attitudes towards Jews
in the Late Middle Ages, Dr. Turner is working
on an article that began as her keynote address
at a conference on Alchemical Cosmology,
held at Purdue University in 2013.
Her talk tonight is based upon a book she is writing
for Hackett Publishing, that will be titled
"Seven Myths of the Scientific Revolution,"
as part of Hackett's "Seven Myths" series.
At the end, there will be time for questions.
So, without further ado, please welcome
Dr. Nancy Turner.
(audience applauds)
- It's a great pleasure to be here, and I want
to thank all of you for coming to my talk tonight.
So, the title of my talk reads
"Five Myths about the Scientific Revolution,"
and for the purposes of my talk,
I'm going to use the years of 1500
to 1700 as the dates for the Scientific Revolution.
You'll sometimes encounter people
who use the year of 1543 as the year
that the Scientific Revolution began, because that is
the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus's book,
Placing the Sun at the Center of the universe,
was first published, and you'll sometimes encounter
the year 1727 as the end date for the Scientific
Revolution, because that's the year in which Isaac Newton
died, but I like using 1500 as the beginning
dates, because there were scientific thinkers, including
Copernicus, who were already presenting radically new ideas
about the natural world in the decades leading up
to 1543, and 1700 as the date helps
to remove Isaac Newton from being such a central
focus of the Scientific Revolution.
This 200-year period has earned the label Scientific
Revolution because many of the natural philosophers
and natural philosopher was the word used
instead of "scientist," all the way from ancient times
until the early 19th century, when the word "scientist"
was first coined, but it was during these 200
years that the practitioners of natural philosophy then
began to rigorously and wholeheartedly question
the explanations and conclusions about the natural
world that had been arrived at and taught
by Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers,
and still dominated the teachings about the natural
world in the 1500s, particularly the teachings
of Aristotle in the areas of physics, astronomy,
and biology, and then, the teachings of Hippocrates
and Galen in the areas of medicine and human
anatomy, but the thinkers of the Scientific
Revolution did not simply question the conclusions
of previous scientific thinkers, they began to suggest
new and often radically different conclusions and ways
of understanding and describing the natural world.
So, I've noticed that many people who have a notion
of what the Scientific Revolution was about
have several consistent misperceptions, shall we say,
about the ideas and thinkers associated
with the Scientific Revolution, and, although I could
come up with probably eight or ten common myths
I've encountered, let me tonight just present five
myths, or, as I said, misperceptions
that I've discovered people hold,
that I'd like to address and correct.
The first is the common belief
that the popes of the 16th century condemned
Copernicus's theory and all those who supported it.
That's a myth, as we'll see.
The second, that the Protestant Reformation
was a social and religious movement and thus had
no impact upon the Scientific Revolution.
Third, new discoveries in medicine
and biology lagged behind discoveries
in astronomy and physics during the Scientific Revolution.
Again, a myth.
Four, the thinkers behind the Scientific Revolution
disdained the use of mysticism and spirituality
in pursuing new knowledge about the natural world.
And, finally, the alchemists of the Scientific
Revolution were solely interested in finding a way
to transform lead into gold.
All misperceptions.
So, let's start with the misperception many people
have concerning the 16th century
reception of Nicolaus Copernicus's
Sun-Centered universe.
I think it's commonly believed today
that Copernicus postponed the publication of his famous
work "On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres"
until he was on his death bed, out of fear that the Pope,
or other powerful members of the Christian clergy
would attack and condemn him for his theory,
and I've noticed it's commonly believed
that Copernicus's fear of going public
with his idea was based upon the fact
that there are several passages in the Bible
that clearly imply that the Earth remains
stationary and at the center of the cosmos and it's
the Sun and the planets that move in a circle around it.
However, it's simply not true that popes
during Copernicus's lifetime, or during the decades
that followed his death attacked or denounced
Copernicus's Sun-Centered model of the universe,
and I should point out, of course,
that Copernicus was incorrect when he argued that the Sun
was at the center of the universe, because we know today
that the Sun is only at the center of our tiny
little Solar System, but astronomers
in the 16th century didn't know that yet, but,
not only did the popes of the 16th century
not condemn the Copernican model,
but, as I'll address in a minute, Pope Gregory XIII
in the 1580s actually adopted Copernicus's
Sun-Centered model of the universe as a tool
to reform the Western calendar, so that the date
for Easter could be more accurately calculated,
and it was actually within the context of calendar reform
that Copernicus first began to ponder
the movements of the Sun and the planets.
So, let me back up just a little bit and
briefly talk about Copernicus's life and his studies.
There we have his photo and his death dates,
and, indeed, he did die in the same year
that his magnum opus was finally published:
his work "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres."
Copernicus was born in 1473
in what is now northern Poland.
As a young man, Copernicus studied medicine and canon law
in Italy, and, after completing his studies
in 1503, he got a job, if you will,
as a church canon.
Basically, that means he was a clerical administrator
of a cathedral, in this case, and its parish,
in the city of Frombork, or Frauenburg,
among the German speakers, but near
his hometown back in Poland, and he remained
in that job and in that town of Frombork
for the rest of his life, but, by the time
Copernicus was 30 years old, he had already
gained a reputation as a very talented
mathematician whose interests included
astronomy, and, sometime between 1503
and 1513, Copernicus became
convinced that a heliocentric or Sun-Centered
universe was the physical reality
of the cosmos.
We're not entirely sure how or why Copernicus
came to this conclusion, but we know
he had done so by 1513, because
in 1514, very early
in the 16th century, he published
a short book called "Commentariolus,"
or "Short Commentary," in which he
presented the basics of his Sun-Centered model
and explained the ways in which it was superior
to the Earth-centered model of the Greco-Roman
astronomer, Ptolemy, and it was
Ptolemy's Earth-centered model that had been
taught and used in Europe
beginning in about 200 AD or CE,
and was still being taught
in universities in the 1500s,
and here we have Copernicus's
Sun-Centered universe,
and this is the actual diagram, or it's a copy
of the actual diagram in his work,
and there he wrote his work in Latin,
and you have there in the center Sol, or the Sun,
and, then, he presents
Mercury, Venus.
The Earth is the Telluris,
and, at this point, Earth was
the only planet known to have a satellite
of any kind, and that was the Moon.
Notice that, by this point, actually into
the 1700s, there were only six
planets known, with Saturn
being the farthest away.
So, this is Copernicus's
heliocentric universe.
Here's Ptolemy's, the Ancient
Greco-Roman thinker, who came up
with an Earth-centered model,
that he didn't claim was the reality
of the cosmos, he simply
presented it as a way to calculate,
and, if you will, predict the movements of the planets.
We know, and you can see here, that the Earth
is in the center, and the Sun is, if you will,
the third entity in the line
of planets, but you'll notice that
Copernicus had, in order to make his model
work in any way, create calculations
that were useful in any way, Copernicus
had to add these extra circles,
known as epicircles that went around,
no, actually, that every planet circled.
So, these circles,
and you can see the little planets
on these outer orbits, if you will,
these were the epicycles on which the planets
then circled, but the center of the epicycles
was centered around the actual orbits.
Now, this was a time in which ancient thinkers,
coming from Aristotle, believed that the orbits
of the planets, or that the planets were actually
encased in true crystalline spheres,
which would mean that this sort
of model was like an onion, and
you could peal away the layers, and then,
get the next crystalline sphere.
There's no way to make crystalline spheres work
if you have to say that the planets are embedded
in them if you have epicycles, because
the planets would break the crystalline spheres,
and Ptolemy acknowledged that and argued
or suggested that this placing all of the planets and, then,
the fixed stars, the stars that didn't move,
suggesting that this model was not supposed
to be viewed as the physical truth, the physical
reality of the cosmos, but just a convenient
model, if you will, to be used to move the planets
around in your head, and then, calculate
where they should be, or where they would be
over time, in relation to each other,
but this system was known as the Ptolemaic system,
and was the system that Copernicus
was coming up against
when talking to other scientists.
So, the short work that Copernicus
published right back in 1514
described the basics of his
heliocentric universe, but it contained
no mathematical equations, no diagrams,
but did precisely outline Copernicus's argument,
and this is what was very significant
about Copernicus's idea, that not only did
placing the Sun in the center of the universe result
in more accurate calculations, predicting the movements
of the planets, it also provided
a schema that was simpler than imagining that the Sun
and all of the fixed stars and planets all moved,
these huge entities moved around the Earth
once a day, but Copernicus argued
and was convinced that the heliocentric
universe was the physical truth.
He was presenting his model not simply
as a convenient way to calculate
the movements of the heavens.
Copernicus was insisting that this was the reality,
that the Sun was in the center of the universe.
He pointed out that putting the Sun in the universe
offered a simpler image of the cosmos, because
he pointed out it would explain why it was
that Mercury and Venus had phases
as they moved across the sky, just like the Moon does,
and that's because Mercury and Venus
are between the Earth and the Sun.
He argued that the Sun-Centered universe
better explains the retrogressing movements
of the planets, in other words, the fact that
all of the planets appear, as they're moving across
the night sky, appear to back up, if you will,
and make a loop, and then, straighten out again,
for a while, and then, back up and make a loop.
It was this that Ptolemy was trying to understand,
or trying to explain with his epicycles,
because you can see how
the planets...
Let's use Mars.
Mars would eventually go backward
on the epicycle, as the whole
orbit was moving along.
Copernicus explained how one could get rid
of that with a Sun-Centered universe,
and Copernicus's "Short Summary,"
laying out his Sun-Centered model
was well received when it came out
in 1514, and Copernicus suffered
no negative repercussions from it.
In fact, his arguments for a Sun-Centered universe
quickly became well-known and admired
in scientifically-educated circles, throughout Europe,
over the next 30 years, and we know that
his new model was known
and being taught, because a young
German mathematician, named
Georg Joachim Rheticus, we learned
that Rheticus had been introduced
to Copernicus's theory by his teacher
at the University of Wittenberg,
and Rheticus was so intrigued by Copernicus's model,
that, in 1539, he set out
to meet Copernicus, in order to learn
the details of Copernicus's model.
When Rheticus met with Copernicus, in 1539,
in Frombork, he discovered that,
by this time, Copernicus had completed
a 400-page work that he had titled
On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres,
and, in this document, this volume,
Copernicus did provide multiple diagrams,
extensive calculations, and in-depth
explanations for his argument,
defending it and explaining it.
And, as I said, it's clear in this version
of "On the Revolutions," that Copernicus was arguing
that the Sun was indeed truly in the center of the universe,
and that he didn't mean his theory or model to be
understood as simply a possible configuration
of the planets that could be used to produce
more reliable predictions, and this is important,
trust me, as I'll explain in a minute.
However, Copernicus was very much a product
of his society and culture, and assumed, as everybody
did, including Galileo, that the planets moved
in perfect circular orbits, and, using
perfectly circular orbits for the planets,
even with the Sun in the center, resulted
in calculations that were more accurate
than the Ptolemaic system, but
were still not perfectly accurate.
So, even the Copernican system didn't provide
a way of predicting the movements of a planet
that came out perfectly, because
it would be 1609 before Johannes Kepler
determined that the planets move in elliptical orbits,
not circular orbits, and thus finally allowing for precise and
perfectly accurate calculations of planetary movements.
So, Copernicus's system with the Sun in the center
was only slightly more accurate than
Ptolemy's Earth-centered universe,
and, of course, Copernicus recognized this,
and it was this lack of perfect accuracy,
not fear of the Pope, that made
Copernicus apprehensive about publishing
his magnum opus, because he feared that
the mathematicians and astronomers of Europe,
his peers, if you will, would notice that
his calculations did not result in perfectly
accurate predictions, and, thus, would disdain
and dismiss him and his arguments,
or, at the very least, say "This is nice,
"but it has to be just another possible theory,
"because it doesn't explain
"the exact movements all that much better
"than what we currently have."
Besides that, Copernicus knew that a Sun-Centered
universe would sound foolish and actually impossible
to many people, because
many people did begin asking the question
that if the Earth spun, and it had to spin
very quickly, to rotate once a day,
why didn't humans spin off the surface of the Earth,
and Copernicus had no answer to that.
They also asked "So, why, if the surface
"of the Earth is spinning, again, extremely quickly,
"why would it be that, if you throw rocks
"or any item very high up in the sky,
"why does it fall exactly down
"from where it came up?
"Shouldn't it fall a few feet behind,
"or in front?"
because the ground would be moving under it.
And that's not what happened.
So, he was aware
that a Sun-Centered universe might be hard
to get people to accept, or embrace,
because it goes against all of our sense data.
I mean, we stand on the Earth and we feel ourselves
stationary, and we see the planets, the Sun,
and everything moving around us.
So, our sense data tells us that the Copernican
theory or model must be wrong.
Rheticus's indispensable contribution
to Western science was that he was able
to convince Copernicus, as Copernicus was faced
with all of these doubts, or fear of scientific
backlash, Copernicus was able to convince...
I'm sorry, Rheticus was able to convince Copernicus
that natural philosophers and mathematicians
all over Europe would not ridicule his book,
but, instead, would be intrigued and impressed.
In 1540, then, Copernicus agreed to allow
Rheticus to first, publish a "Short Summary," again,
of his longer On the Revolutions,
which, again, contained Copernicus's
key heliocentric arguments, along with a promise
that the longer, complete work would appear soon.
This "Short Summary" of 1540
attracted so much attention within the scientific
community, that a second edition of this little book
was printed the very next year, in 1541.
And then, finally, with the help of Rheticus,
the full text edition of "On the Revolutions
of the Heavenly Spheres" was finally published
in Nuremberg in 1543,
and the reception of Copernicus's complete work
was so positive within the scientific world,
that, tellingly, a second edition of the work
was published in 1566, and,
as I'll point out later, a third edition of the book
was published in 1617, a year after
the Pope put it on the Index of Forbidden Books.
Now, it's frequently pointed out, as it should be,
that one reason that Copernicus's Sun-Centered model
did not attract the immediate ire, if you will,
of the Pope, was that Rheticus,
who Copernicus had put in charge of delivering his work
to a publisher, at the very last minute, gave
the manuscript to an associate named
Andreas Osiander, and, apparently,
Osiander had less courage than Rheticus
and Copernicus did, because, apparently, in order
to protect Copernicus from possible attack
by Church authorities, Osiander wrote himself,
wrote and attached a preface to Copernicus's
book, that implied it had been written
by Copernicus himself, and that stated
in effect that the Sun-Centered model
described in the book was meant to be viewed
simply as one of many possible hypotheses
concerning the position and movements of the planets,
the Earth, the Sun, and that Copernicus meant
for his model simply to be used to come up
with more accurate calculations.
When Rheticus discovered this added preface,
he was furious with his friend, but,
nevertheless, there it was.
The book was published with this preface,
and this false preface had the effect that Osiander
intended it to have, in that it seems
to have watered down the impact
of Copernicus's heliocentric universe,
and made it easier for religious officials
to accept what they saw as simply a useful hypothesis,
and remember Copernicus's heliocentric model
still did not produce perfectly accurate calculations.
So, it was reasonable to assume that it
was not the reality, the physical reality.
The physical reality would produce exact
and perfect calculations.
So, this made it possible for even
the most literal readers of the Bible
to embrace or accept Copernicus's system
as only a hypothesis, and on the issue
of the way planetary motion was described in the Bible,
there was actually no consensus at that time,
even among Roman Catholic theologians
about how literally the Bible was to be understood
when it came to descriptions of the natural world.
It was common by the second half of the 16th century
to encounter multiple theologians and scientists
who were arguing that God had meant the teachings
of the Bible to be understandable to even
the most simple believers, and thus, it was not
meant to be viewed as describing the physical
reality of the natural world, if
such descriptions would be too confusing
or hard to understand for simple readers.
And there were Catholic Church leaders who openly argued
that Scripture should not be read as a guide
to scientific fact, but only as a guide to salvation.
So, for instance, in 1598, a Roman
Catholic Cardinal, named Cesare
Baronius stated, quote: "The intention
"of the Bible is to teach us how"...
I'm sorry.
"The intention of the Bible is to teach us how one goes
"to heaven, not how the heavens go."
And this attitude is very likely why
Pope Gregory XIII in the 1580s
was willing to actually embrace
the Sun-Centered model, because, for several
centuries, popes have been trying to come up
with a more accurate way of predicting when
the first fool moon after the spring equinox...
No, when the Sunday of the first full moon
after the spring equinox would occur,
so that the date of Easter could be
more accurately and consistently predicted,
and the Copernican model did allow this,
and, indeed, using the Copernican model,
Pope Gregory issued a brand-new calendar,
with corrections based upon the Sun-Centered model,
and this reformed calendar, which got
rid of ten days, or moved up
the days by ten, is the calendar we call
the Gregorian calendar, and is still
the calendar we use today.
It replaced the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar
back in about 45 BCE.
So, in the course between
1543 and the early 1600s,
there was no condemnation whatsoever coming from the pope,
or religious leaders, and, indeed, even when,
in 1616, finally, a pope placed
Copernicus's work on the index of forbidden books,
that pope declared that the information contained
in Copernicus's book was not heretical,
but only false.
And then, in 1617, as I said before,
a third edition of "On the Revolutions"
was published in Protestant Amsterdam,
without the false preface by Osiander,
and, again, there were no negative repercussions
for those who openly held the Copernican system.
And, indeed, we know that in the decades leading up
to 1616, that there were ten
thinkers who openly identified themselves
as Copernicans, as true Copernicans,
in other words, thinkers who believed
that it was the physical reality that the Sun
was at the center of the universe, and that the Earth
was just another one of the six planets.
Seven of these ten natural philosophers
were German.
I'm sorry, seven of the ten were Protestants,
and the last three were Roman Catholics,
and this will become important in a minute.
And these ten thinkers encountered no persecution
at all, no pushback, no condemnation
for their open support of the physical truth
of a Sun-Centered universe.
Indeed, the Lutheran Protestant Johannes Kepler
published his first, the first of many,
of his overtly pro-Copernican works,
called "Secrets of the Cosmos," in 1596,
and afterwards went on to be employed
and respected by two deeply Catholic
Holy Roman Emperors, and was never hold up
before the Inquisition for any
of his pro-Copernican works,
and I might add that Galileo was not
really punished for supporting
a Sun-Centered universe.
He was actually punished for belligerently and very
rudely arguing with the pope and his administrators
about a Sun-Centered universe.
So, I mentioned just a minute ago that six of the ten
open or overt Copernicans by 1600 were Protestants,
and that is not an unimportant fact to note,
because these leaves me to address another myth
about the scientific revolution, and that is
that the Protestant Reformation was a social
and religious movement, and thus
had no impact upon the Scientific Revolution.
As a historian of science, one of the central
concepts, if not even the central concept
I work to get my students to grasp and accept
is that scientists in Ancient, Medieval,
Early Modern Times, as well as today
cannot help but be heavily influenced
by the beliefs, and assumptions, and values
of the society they live in, and that
those beliefs, assumptions, and values have
a profound influence on the mindset of scientific
thinkers, as well as the conclusions they are
capable of drawing about the world around them.
Let me illustrate, then, how the Protestant Reformation
and the changes in religious outlook it brought
benefited and encouraged
the acceptance of the Copernican theory.
Let me very quickly present the broad outlines
of the Protestant Reformation, so that
its influence can be more apparent.
The Reformation was sparked, or started
in 1517, in Wittenberg,
Germany, by the German monk, Martin Luther,
who, after carefully studying the Bible,
decided that, for the previous 1300 years or so,
the Catholic Church had been misunderstanding
the Bible, and thus misinterpreting God's will
concerning salvation and the proper way to lead
a Christian life, and among Luther's many
new conclusions about God's will was
his assertion that any beliefs or behaviors
that had been prescribed by the popes or church
councils, saints, whatever, that any of those
beliefs or behaviors that Luther couldn't find
described in the Bible were not valid,
and should not be followed or practiced,
and among the things Luther declared
could not be found in the Bible,
couldn't be described in the Bible
was the concept of a pope.
So, Luther insisted that good Christians
should only look to the Bible for instruction
about salvation and how to live a good
Christian life, what to think about God's creation,
and not to the pope, nor to any papal proclamations
that had ever been made about Christian belief,
and, in regions of Europe, then, where Protestantism
took a firm hold, so, for instance, that would be
England, parts of Switzerland,
Scotland, all throughout northern Germany,
Denmark, Poland, the Scandinavian countries,
all of those areas adopted
Protestantism relatively early in the 1500s,
and accepted the idea that
the proclamations of the Pope and his officials
were to be discarded and ignored.
And then, most importantly for supporters of the Copernican
universe, Protestantism
provided no centralized, and still doesn't,
no centralized religious hierarchy
that's recognized as having authority to pass judgement
on new ideas, especially new ideas
emerging about nature and the cosmos.
Thus, scientific thinkers in Protestant areas
were able to openly express their support
for the Copernican theory, and openly teach it
as a physical reality, without fear
of persecution from any religious officials
within the Protestant
sphere of Europe.
But it was not solely the Copernican system
that gained special traction because
of the advent of Protestantism.
We find that the thinker Francis Bacon,
who is considered to be the founder
of the idea of a scientific method,
he was influenced by a strain of Protestantism
that emphasized that there was a dramatic transformation
on the horizon in the Christian world, a transformation
that was coming very soon, and that this transformation
would bring about a much improved, more spiritual,
more perfect society, and this was the mindset,
for instance, of the Puritans, who, to some extent,
were trying to usher in that transformation,
by moving to the New World.
But Bacon
insisted that this transformation would also
bring about a transformation in our knowledge
about the natural world, and thus
he decided to pursue, or felt compelled
to pursue new ways of investigating
the natural world and introduce the very basics
of the scientific method, under the influence
of this Protestant Millenarianism, as it's called,
that did not exist in Catholic areas.
So, it's evident that religious and social movements,
as well as political issues, which I haven't even
talked about, could and still do have an impact
upon the development and spread
of new scientific ideas.
Okay, let's look at my third myth;
that new discoveries in medicine and biology
lagged behind discoveries in astronomy and physics
during the Scientific Revolution.
It's been my impression and I certainly
understand this myth, that, usually,
when the Scientific Revolution is discussed
Copernicus's breakthroughs, and Galileo's breakthroughs
are the first new ideas that come up,
and a discussion about how revolutionary
they were is what's usually associated then
with the Scientific Revolution, but this
isn't fair, it's not accurate.
At the same time that Copernicus was working
on this new understanding of the heavens,
there were several natural philosophers
who were challenging the Ancient Greek and Roman
teachings about medicine and anatomy
and making breakthroughs in those areas.
For instance, Andreas Vesalius.
In the same year that Copernicus's work
was published, Vesalius published a work
called "On the Fabric of the Human Body."
And this is just one image from it,
in which he makes it clear that he had been spending
a decade or more carefully dissecting
and analyzing human anatomy, and
was coming up with a much more accurate
understanding of how the human body worked,
than had been the case ever before.
At the same time, a friend of his, by the name
of Gabriele Falloppio was
dissecting animals, and observed...
And he was deliberately trying to understand
reproduction at all levels of life,
and first dissected chickens, and found
evidence of Fallopian tubes.
He then dissected other animals and found
the same evidence, and then, finally,
found Fallopian tubes in human
women, adding to our knowledge
about how reproduction worked.
At the same time, or very soon after,
Copernicus and his ideas about astronomy
and mathematics were taking place.
Another thinker from slightly later
was the natural philosopher William Harvey,
who took on the ancient thinker Galen's
arguments about how blood moved through the body,
and he, in 1628, finally published
his findings that convinced people
that blood moved through the heart, and veins,
came back up through the lungs,
and then went back to the heart,
but adding to our understanding, again,
of an area of biology, medicine, anatomy.
We also have the great thinker Anton
van Leeuwenhoek, who, in the late 1600s,
playing with optics, perfected a microscope,
and, of course, turned it at the small
world, and discovered, for instance,
single-celled organisms, which he called animalcules.
He was the first person to observe bacteria
and to make notations about
how bacteria lived and thrived.
He analyzed plants and, interestingly,
analyzed spermatozoa, or discovered
spermatozoa, all with microscopes
that were incredibly good at magnifying.
He came up with drawings, for instance,
of bee stings, fungus, human louse,
and began publishing his findings in 1674.
Among the things he ended up ultimately doing,
then, is arguing that, because he had managed
to observe very closely the life cycles of maggots
and fleas, he was able to argue
that maggots and fleas were indeed actually born
or generated from other animals like them,
and that they did not spontaneously generate,
which was the belief that was
dominant before that.
He also added to our understanding of anatomy
by discovering lymphatic capillaries,
adding again to knowledge outside
of the world of physics.
Okay, and then, Robert Hooke did
a lot of work also with a microscope,
and first turned the microscope at cork,
and discovered these little tiny, what he called,
cells, and coined the term "cell,"
adding, again, to our collection of knowledge
about what we today would term "biology."
Here's the forth myth, that the thinkers
behind the Scientific Revolution disdained
the use of mysticism and spirituality
in pursuing new knowledge about the natural world.
It's been my sense that people assume that
because Galileo, Copernicus, Newton
are associated with being mathematicians,
and using logic and painstaking
observation, that we assume that they were
cold, rational studiers
of the natural world,
but we find out that even such great thinkers
were motivated by irrational
mindsets, associated with mysticism
and spirituality.
Thinkers like Kepler and Newton
believed that the cosmos was truly alive,
animate, that it had a soul,
and that this soul or spirit pervaded
all aspects of the cosmos, and that
one explanation for movement in the natural world
was that the inner soul of objects
were somehow consciously almost moving
and seeking their rest, even if it was simply
inanimate objects, or things like the planets.
For instance, Kepler, remember, the mathematician
who worked out mathematically that the planets
move in ellipses, thus, finally making the Copernican
universe perfectly mathematically accurate,
argued that or stated that, to him, the Copernican
system, that within the Copernican system
there existed a splendid harmony
that mystically demonstrated the truth of the Holy Trinity.
He argued that the Sun represented God, the Father,
that the fixed stars represented Christ, the Son,
and that the intermediate space stood for the Holy Ghost.
And he believed, then, that there was a single motive
force that governed planetary motions,
and he called this force "anima motrix,"
or a moving spirit,
and that this moving spirit was
propelled by a kind of harmony that existed
among the spheres, among the heavens,
based upon some pure numerical relationship
that had ratios that corresponded to musical
ratios, so that Kepler came up
with the idea that one could actually
notate like music the ratios
of the distances of the planets
from each other, and he, indeed, wrote a work
called The Harmony of the Spheres,
which contained an actual kind of musical score that
helped explain or illustrate how the planets moved.
He also believed that we could better understand
how the planets moved by referring back to
the five Platonic solids
of Plato, and that the way you placed
those solids into each other, on the left,
represented the ratio between the planets.
Even Isaac Newton believed that space
is filled with spirit, a spirit that acts
upon matter, and Newton accepted the existence
of occult forces in nature.
He believed that these forces had been referred to
by the ancient wise ones and Newton used
this belief in these forces, these hidden forces at work,
he used this idea to work with, without really
worrying a whole lot about the ultimate causes,
he simply accepted their existence.
He hoped that by finally understanding
and explaining the movements of the planets,
as well as the movements of objects on Earth,
he might finally catch a glimpse of the divine
truth that permeated the universe,
and that had been placed there,
in Newton's opinion, by God.
There's Newton at the young and dashing age of 45.
And William Gilbert, you may know,
is the individual who's credited with working
with magnetism and understanding
or explaining its role in the rotation of the Earth.
To William Gilbert, magnetism was an incorporeal
force that was the primal energy of nature.
He said that magnetism was, as
he said, the soul of the Earth,
because Gilbert also saw nature
as being alive through and through,
and Gilbert argued or stated
that the Earth revolved because
of its magnetic soul.
Okay, let's move on to the fifth myth;
that the alchemists of the Scientific Revolution
were solely interested in finding a way
to transform lead into gold.
I think alchemy sometimes gets a bad rap these days.
To many people, the idea that one can take a base metal
and turn it into gold sound silly and absurd.
So, many people today assume that the people
of the 16th century and even before that
who devoted their time and energy to finding
or making an elixir or substance that could
change various substances into gold
were somehow delusional or obtuse,
but it's important to remember that such thinkers
were pursuing the goal of turning base metals
into gold before it was known that gold was an element.
They didn't yet know that it couldn't
be broken down any farther,
and they noted that gold and silver,
if you will, grew inside the Earth,
and that the elements or substances inside the Earth
were combined and recombined by nature
to produce gold, silver, et cetera,
and that, just as things like bronze
were combinations of different elements that could be
separated from each other, they believed that,
perhaps, gold and silver were also made up
of substances that could be broken down,
and that, if they could figure out what the substances
were that made up gold, they could go find
those substances, put them together, and make gold.
So, alchemists did spend a lot of their time
heating substances and watching what happened,
adding acids to substances to see what happened to them,
how they broke down, taking those things produced
by heating or acids and combining them together
to see what came out of this, and it was
not really, for really devout alchemists,
it wasn't for the purpose of finding
how to turn lead into gold, it was simply
in order to learn the nature of substances,
to learn what they were made of.
They chose gold because it did seem to have
magical properties, and they hoped
that, if they could figure out how this sort of magical
gold, it doesn't dissolve in nitric acid,
it can be combined with silver, mercury, and other things,
and then, through various laboratory measures
removed from what it had been combined with,
et cetera, making it, as I said, look almost magical,
and many alchemists did think that, if they could figure out
what gold was made of, that they would get,
again, a kind of glimpse into the mind of God,
a glimpse into the mind of the Creator,
and come to a better understanding
about how all of nature worked.
One of the better known alchemists, if you will,
of the, again, early and mid 1500s
was a Swiss physician by the name of Paracelsus.
I just thought I'd give you images of
alchemy laboratories, always a furnace
to heat things up very hot,
hotter than substances
were used to experiencing,
various jars, tools.
Here's an alchemy lab of the late 1600s,
with some of the strange-looking tools
that we associate, perhaps,
a little more with alchemy.
I guess Paracelsus I'm not going to be able
to get you his name there, but his name
was spelled much like it sounds.
He died in 1541,
and, to him, alchemy was a way to identify
the chemicals contained in the human body,
and then, to use that knowledge of those chemicals
to create medicines, medicines that
would produce health or maintain health.
And he believed that God wanted human beings
to investigate the physical nature of the human body,
in order to understand God's creation better.
To Paracelsus, the true physician must be
an alchemist who, in his laboratory, would manipulate
the forces of the heavens that acted upon metals
and, by doing so, come up with a kind of universal
medicine from the knowledge
he acquired by looking into the substance,
the makeup of nature.
He, indeed, proclaimed all changes in the body
should be understood through chemicals,
and diseases are to be treated with chemicals.
He insisted that the human body is
a chemical factory, as is all of nature,
and thus, using alchemy or, at least,
the tools of alchemy to better understand
what substances were made of, was,
if you will, to Paracelsus, doing God's work,
using our God-given intelligence to better understand
the magnificence of God's creation.
So, I've chosen to address these five myths,
or maybe misperceptions is a better word?
and, hopefully, gone at least a little way
towards dispelling a lot of the false beliefs
I fear many people have about the breakthroughs
that occurred during the Scientific Revolution,
and, perhaps, come to a better understanding
of the impact of social and religious events,
even mysticism, upon scientific discoveries.
And, most of all, as a historian,
my hope is simply to get people to acquire
an accurate understanding of the events
of the 16th and 17th century.
So, I'll end it there.
(audience applauds)
Thank you.