The Scientific Revolution

The question

Why did the systematic, cumulative, mathematized, experimental method we now call “modern science” emerge in early-modern Europe — roughly 1543 (Copernicus) through 1687 (Newton’s Principia) — rather than in equally accomplished prior civilizations (Greece, the Islamic Golden Age, Song China)?

Status

Planned. This debate overlaps with — but is not identical to — the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence. The IR is downstream of useful knowledge (Mokyr’s Industrial Enlightenment thesis), and useful knowledge is partly downstream of the Scientific Revolution. But the Scientific Revolution can also be analyzed independently — what changed in epistemic practice, who the proponents were, what made their methods spread.

The lead figures will include Steven Shapin, H. Floris Cohen, David Wootton, Toby Huff, Mokyr (again), and the older Marxist tradition (Hessen, Bernal). Recurring positions: the “Merton thesis” (Protestant ethic and science), Needham’s “why not China” puzzle, the “Republic of Letters” institutional account, the patronage-and-courts case (Biagioli on Galileo), the printing-press case, and the secular explanation rooted in early-modern legal and commercial culture.

See the Industrial Revolution debate for the position-mapping convention this page will follow.