‘Historians have long puzzled over why the Scientific Revolution happened, and why it happened in Europe’
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Between 1500 and 1700, the European understanding of nature changed dramatically. In astronomy, the ancient geocentric theory of the heavens was succeeded first by Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric reform, then by Johannes Kepler’s elliptical orbits and Isaac Newton’s celestial mechanics. In physics, Aristotle’s qualitative explanation of motion and change was consigned to the dustbin of intellectual history by Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Newton. In anatomy and physiology, the Roman physician Galen’s mistaken understanding of the body gave way to Andreas Vesalius’s anatomy and William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. New instruments—the telescope, the microscope, and the barometer and the air pump (which together showed that air has weight)—opened new worlds. And new forms of organization and communication—the scientific society, the learned journal—developed to encourage and sustain this bustling activity. The changes were so dramatic that, for nearly a century, these developments have been referred to collectively as the Scientific Revolution.
Historians have long puzzled over why the Scientific Revolution happened, and why it happened in Europe. In Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution, sociologist Toby Huff addresses both questions. Huff provides an overview of the Scientific Revolution, drawn from reliable secondary literature, along with an idiosyncratic and occasionally puzzling attempt to show why the revolution did not happen in China or the Islamic empires, both of which had rich scientific traditions in the central Middle Ages.
Huff devotes the first part of the book to an account of the invention of the telescope at the beginning of the 17th century. The “discovery machine,” as he terms the instrument, was pointed at the sky in England by Thomas Harriot, who did not publish his observations, and in Italy by Galileo, who announced his early discoveries in spectacular fashion in his Starry Messenger(1610). Galileo and others continued to explore the skies, making new discoveries and quickly reaching consensus about their reality. For Huff, the telescope epitomizes the “infectious curiosity” of the Scientific Revolution: As more and more telescopes became available, discoveries begat further discoveries.
But in China and the Islamic world, the discovery machine failed to catch on. Jesuit missionaries brought the telescope to China and trained Chinese astronomers in its use, but they made no discoveries and did not incorporate the instrument into astronomical practice. The telescope was known in the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, but there too it failed to make a mark in astronomy. Compared with Europe, the world’s other advanced civilizations, confronted with the telescope, evinced what Huff calls a “curiosity deficit…”