Principe 4

Assignment for Wed.: propose a paper topic

Write a 4-5 page double-spaced typed paper (in a 12 point font) discussing an idea from the Principe book and comparing Principe's example with an outside past or present-day example. Note that you are required to use this structure: half your paper explaining specifics from the book and half based on research into a material not covered by the book on a related topic, past or present.  You must discuss the method or character or philosophical underpinnings or world view of science during the scientific revolution, not just facts and specific theories.

• scholars at the time expected everything to be connected
• they also expected that science would contribute to faith, not threaten it
• many of them worked for the church in some way (or were funded by local rulers who depended on the church to provide some of the administration of their territories)
  

Religion and science

• Why did the church have a problem with the Copernican theory?
• pretty obscure to see it as contradicting the Bible--people today who are very strict about literal interpretation of the Bible don't have a problem with it, and people at the time didn't read the bible as exactly what happened (eg. there are two accounts of creation that don't agree about the order: Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-25)
  
• if people questioned traditional authority (Aristotle) they might question the church too, which very much rested on traditional authority
  
• religious knowledge and scientific knowledge were mixed together in the universities, which were run by the church, so new ideas in science became a challenge to church authority
  
• Aristotelianism (the scientific ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle) had become interwoven into Christianity, and the Copernican theory, particularly as it began to develop the necessary physics, fundamentally contradicted Aristotelian ideas
  
• God the clockmaker was one possible new approach
  
• God created an amazing complicated universe with laws that our brains were created to be able to understand
  
• but if it is a perfect mechanism, then God never has to interfere
• even if you don't go that far, it leads towards the world as machine, explainable by mathematics
  

The sublunar world:

In Aristotelian physics earth and water naturally fall towards the center of the earth, air and fire naturally rise, and quintessence (the material of the heavenly bodies) naturally goes in circles

structure of the earth

• Many philosophers and church leaders didn't think creation happened in 6 literal days, but they did think the earth was around 6,000 years old
  
• early modern natural philosophers observed the earth and came up with many new ideas
  
• Nicholas Steno recognized that sedimentary rocks captured history
• Athanasius Kircher argued that the lava of a volcanic eruption came from the deep structure of the earth
• William Gilbert showed that the earth had a magnetic field like a magnet and used this as a basis for a physics that would make sense of the Copernican theory
  

Galileo worked on laws of motion

• did experiments with an inclined plane to provide a mathematical description of the acceleration caused by gravity: Velocity=acceleration x time and Distance=acceleration x time²
  
• it doesn't matter what is moving, it will still follow the same laws, and you can describe mathematically the laws governing how things move without knowing the cause
  
• inertia, but in circles
• reduce the physical world to mathematical abstractions (a rather Platonic idea)--this is the approach that eventually won out
  
• a more engineering approach, focused on behavior, not cause

Air pressure

• barometer was invented by Torricelli in 1644: fill a tube closed at one end completely with mercury (because it is the heaviest liquid), and turn it upside down into a bowl of mercury.  The mercury won't all spill out, since air can't get into the tube, but if you have a very long tube the column of mercury will only be 30 inches high.  This measures the pressure of the atmosphere. 
  
• Magni independently invented the barometer and argued that it had a vacuum at the top
• scientists were interested in proving that Aristotle was wrong, that it was possible to create a vacuum
• what use is a vacuum?  Barometer predicts weather, air pumps provide the basis of the steam engine
  
• Otto von Guericke showed the power of air pressure in 1657--watch the video of a recreation--when he pumped air out of a metal sphere to create a vacuum the air pressure on the outside of the sphere compared to the vacuum inside was so great that teams of horses couldn't pull the two halves of the sphere apart

Alchemy

• later chemists looked back and divided early modern chemistry into chemistry and alchemy, but that isn't accurate about what was going on at the time
  
• the boundaries of what we now call chemistry were not clear, Principe uses "chymistry" to indicate this larger subject
  
• without our knowledge of what is an element and what is a compound, the idea of turning lead into gold could be science, not magic (though they never succeeded)
• the traditional set of elements were earth, air, water and fire but they move past that
  
• why focus on turning lead into gold? it was a key point at which the practical mixed with the philosophical
  
• ideas of how to do this were kept secret by writing in metaphors that can also be applied to human transformation and morality, so the field was both practical and having to do with how to improve your soul
• This was seen as secret knowledge only for the initiated
  
• they haven't separated science and religion because changing the physical world is often in correspondence with improving your soul
  
• Paracelsus used distillation to purify medicines and saw biological processes as based in chemistry
• many medicines of the time were inorganic chemicals such as mercury, so the fields were linked
  
• (distilling wine and beer into hard liquor was not widely know until the late middle ages)
  
• theory of tria prima: there are three elements (mercury, sulphur, salt) that combine to make terrestrial materials
  
• chemistry was more closely linked to the work of artisans and lacked classical roots so did not become a university subject
• the ideas of elements and atoms were being explored
• this is a more practical line of development that was combined with the more logic-based and scholarly physics and astronomy to make the scientific revolution
  

Mechanical philosophy

• everything we see with our senses results from the size, shape and motion of tiny particles
• a radical simplification, only size, shape/weight and motion are primary qualities
• in effect everything in the world is in some sense a machine--can be explained from those simple principles
• God as watchmaker
  
• this rejected action at a distance, so it faded out when Newton laid out the law of gravity, but it helped move science towards idealization

During the scientific revolution there was not a dominant world view, but many competing ones.  One thing that was broadly changing is that experiment was becoming more important

• revised Aristotelian--still starting from the authorities such as Aristotle but using evidence to revise their conclusions
  
• mechanical philosophy--nature can be understood as entirely a mechanical clockwork
• Paracelsianism--a chemistry that links together (correspondences) chemical reactions and the soul
• and more

Early modern natural philosophers did not yet agree on how to find and prove answers to their questions