---
title: "History of science"
chunk: 13/19
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:18.549055+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Medieval science ====
The first half of the 14th century saw much important scientific work, largely within the framework of scholastic commentaries on Aristotle's scientific writings. William of Ockham emphasized the principle of parsimony: natural philosophers should not postulate unnecessary entities, so that motion is not a distinct thing but is only the moving object and an intermediary "sensible species" is not needed to transmit an image of an object to the eye. Scholars such as Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme started to reinterpret elements of Aristotle's mechanics. In particular, Buridan developed the theory that impetus was the cause of the motion of projectiles, which was a first step towards the modern concept of inertia. The Oxford Calculators began to mathematically analyze the kinematics of motion, making this analysis without considering the causes of motion. In 1348, the Black Death and other disasters sealed a sudden end to philosophic and scientific development. 

== Renaissance ==

=== Printing and discovery ===

The introduction and rapid spread of the movable type printing press during the 2nd half of the 15th century ended the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, where facts were few and far between, and replaced it with a printing culture where reliable and documented facts rapidly proliferated and became the secure foundation for scientific knowledge. 
The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 caused many Byzantine scholars to seek refuge in the West. 
In the mid-15th century, Venetian glassmakers developed the exceptionally clear colourless glass, cristallo, made from high-purity quartz pebbles (instead of sand) and using manganese oxide as a "decolorizer" to neutralize the greenish tint caused by iron impurities. This was the "specialty" glass of the era, a luxury product used for windows, mirrors, ships' lanterns, and lenses. When the first telescope was later invented during the Scientific Revolution, the first historical record of the invention did not appear in a work of natural philosophy but rather in a patent filed by a spectacle maker.
The encounter with the Americas, continents that were completely unknown to the ancients, profoundly impacted European intellectual life in the 16th century and specifically undermined the authority of Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd-century scholar whose geographic and astronomical models had previously been considered infallible.
Vesalius's work on human cadavers found problems with the Galenic view of anatomy.
The Northern Renaissance showed a decisive shift in focus from Aristotelian natural philosophy to chemistry and the biological sciences (botany, anatomy, and medicine).

=== Copernican heliocentrism ===

Copernican heliocentrism is the astronomical model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus and published in 1543. This model positioned the Sun near the center of the Universe, motionless, with Earth and the other planets orbiting around it in circular motions, modified by epicycles, and at uniform speeds. The Copernican model challenged the dominant geocentric model of Ptolemy, which had placed Earth at the center of the Universe. 16th-century astronomers believed that Copernicus' elimination of the equant was his chief achievement but his model never displaced Ptolemy's, which only fell out of favor 70 years later after Galileo's telescopic observations of 1610.

== Scientific Revolution and birth of New Science ==
The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe marked a sharp break with the natural philosophy that had preceded it. The New Science that emerged departed from previous Greek conceptions and traditions, was more mechanistic in its worldview and more integrated with mathematics, and was obsessed with the acquisition and interpretation of new evidence. The Scientific Revolution is a convenient boundary between ancient thought and modern science. While the period is frequently said to have begun in 1543 with the printings of De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius and De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus, the SN 1572 supernova has also been suggested as its beginning. The period culminated with the publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton, representative of the unprecedented growth of scientific publications throughout Europe.

=== Modern astronomy ===

Tycho Brahe's unprecedentedly accurate astronomical observations in the late 16th century and Galileo Galilei’s early 17th-century telescopic observations combined to turn astronomy into the first modern science. Galileo's observations ended a millenium of pre-modern astronomical orthodoxy while Johannes Kepler used Brahe's data to discover that planets have elliptical, not circular, orbits and develop the laws of planetary motion. Because of Kepler, astronomical phenomena came to be seen as being governed by physical laws.

=== Calculus and Newtonian mechanics ===

In 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica, detailing two comprehensive and successful physical theories: Newton's laws of motion, which led to classical mechanics; and Newton's law of universal gravitation, which describes the fundamental force of gravity.

=== Emergence of chemistry ===

A decisive moment came when "chemistry" was distinguished from alchemy by Robert Boyle in his work The Sceptical Chymist, in 1661; although the alchemical tradition continued for some time after his work. Other important steps included the gravimetric experimental practices of medical chemists like William Cullen, Joseph Black, Torbern Bergman and Pierre Macquer and through the work of Antoine Lavoisier ("father of modern chemistry") on oxygen and the law of conservation of mass, which refuted phlogiston theory. Modern chemistry emerged from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries through the material practices and theories promoted by alchemy, medicine, manufacturing and mining.

=== Circulatory system ===
William Harvey published De Motu Cordis in 1628, which revealed his conclusions based on his extensive studies of vertebrate circulatory systems. He identified the central role of the heart, arteries, and veins in producing blood movement in a circuit, and failed to find any confirmation of Galen's pre-existing notions of heating and cooling functions. The history of early modern biology and medicine is often told through the search for the seat of the soul. Galen in his descriptions of his foundational work in medicine presents the distinctions between arteries, veins, and nerves using the vocabulary of the soul.