The Enlightenment in Europe

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The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, a time of discoveries
(1500-1800)
“The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.”

During the renaissance the wealthy middleclass had rediscovered the teachings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The culture that developed in this time period stressed personal achievement and classi¬cal learning. In medieval Europe, the church had had the people in a strangle¬hold. When the Renaissance came, the church was reformed and not as powerful as before. Therefore, scientists and philosophers were allowed and encouraged to think freely and pub¬lish their works.
The end of the Renaissance coincides with the beginning of the Enlightenment, and the scientists of the Enlightenment continued what the humanists of the Renaissances had started, to learn more about the world. What happened during the times of the Enlightenment was that the approach to science changed. Logical reasoning had to be supported by experi¬ments and observations, and proved by mathematics. This is called the scientific method, and is still used by today’s scientists. As the use of the scientific method spread, some persons made discoveries and observations about our world that lead to new theories. The new ideas spread to both the monarchs and the philosophers of the time-pe¬riod. Monarchs tried to gov¬ern their nations by using Enlightenment ideas, philosophers started to search for natural laws of the human nature. The free market, the freedom of speech and press and the discovery of blood circulation are all ideas of the Enlightenment that we are influenced by, just to mention a few.
One of the great thinkers that made a huge contribution to the Scientific revolu¬tion was Sir Isaac Newton. He was born on the Christmas day of 1643 in Lincolnshire, Eng¬land. Once someone has said that –“Nature and Nature''''s laws lay hid in night; God said, ''''Let Newton be!'''' and all was light”. Surely, Sir Isaac Newton was the one who revealed many se¬crets of nature and its functionings. Newton was the son of an illiterate farmer. This father died before Isaac’s birth. His mother remarried and Isaac was brought up by his grandmother. At the age of eighteen Newton was sent to the University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics.
His most famous and important work is his compendious Principia Mathe¬matica. In that book he presents not just explanations of natural phenomena but also a new philosophy. That philosophy was sprung out of the beliefs of another much earlier philoso¬pher and scientist, Aristotle. They both believed that the universe is like a huge machine that functions by its own laws. Aristotle proved this by reasoning, but Newton had adopted the ideas of Copernicus. He proved his theories using mathematics. Newton thought that since the universe is like a machine, there is no need to in¬volve religion in the explanations of natural phenomena. They can all be explained mathematically because like machine, the uni¬verse operates in a rational and predictable way. This didn’t mean that Newton was an atheist. As he both believed and proved mathematically that nothing can move by it¬self he was con¬vinced, just as Aristotle that an “Unmoved Mover” must have set it all in motion from the beginning of time. According to Newton, this “Unmoved Mover” is God.
Newton is mostly remembered as the discoverer of gravity and for his principles based on equations that explain his discoveries. The principles, which are called Newton’s laws, are the founda¬tion for most of present-day’s science. What is often forgotten is the in¬fluence that Newton’s works have had on both the history of science and the human history. He influenced human history by giving us the mechanistic view of the universe, an idea that influenced all the economics, politics, ethics and other science of the Enlightenment. Some of the ideas sprung out of this era are, as mentioned before, still used by today’s society. New¬ton’s way to approach science, to exclude religion and explain prin¬ciples by mathematics was totally new to the world when Newton first used it. Today it is the only ap¬proach to science that is accepted. Newton’s idea of a mechanistic world is what characterizes the Sci¬entific revolution. Someon...