Nice essay but I think you’d benefit from studying the history of science a bit more. Thomas Kuhn’s view of paradigms overturning one another is not supported; since Kepler and Galileo it has been almost wholly cumulative. You get can get Kepler’s and Galileo’s laws from Newton’s and you can get Kepler’s and Galileo’s and Newton’s from Einstein’s; the surprises have largely been interpretive. Most of the limitations of Galileo’s and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws were known within the framework of those systems. The sense in which the contemporaries of, say, Newton thought that the Newtonian system was “certain” was as a philosophical extension of his science: they thought the necessary extensions needed to address the problems would be broadly “Newtonian” in nature. Theirs was a failure of speculation and not science.
The “revolutions” have only been from systems of folk belief (sometimes sophisticated derivatives like Aristotelian thought) to modern science. Aristotle was not a mathematician of any sort or an experimentalist of any sort; that is, he was not in any way a scientist. His system was subject to sophisticated extension by the Alexandrian Greeks (notably Ptolemy used it to create a mathematical system for astronomy) and the Scholastics. For them, mathematics meant Euclidean geometry, and the Scholastics had only parts of it: they did not have the means to do quantitative analysis of any sophistication. No experiments were performed. There are many books published about Greek “science,” Islamic “science,” Medieval “science”; they’re all talking about Aristotle’s “physics” (the only relation with modern physics is the word), which contained no mathematics, no experiments and virtually no observations (although Aristotle extolled the virtues of observation in his methodology, he did not practice what he preached, and neither did his followers).
What Kepler and Galileo brought to the table was a taste for precision in measurement and the willingness to move straight from measurement to mathematical manipulation without taking an unnecessary detour through Aristotelian philosophy (or any philosophy). (Note that Copernicus was still operating in the Aristotelian tradition; he simply moved us out to one of the rotating spheres from our place in the center. Many people overlook Kepler’s achievement because they don’t realize there was then no concept of an orbit; the circular motion was due to astronomical objects being implanted in spinning spheres. Moving to elliptical motions was probably a bigger conceptual leap than moving away from geocentricism.) Given that their contemporaries were measuring nothing (except astronomers), and rarely creating mathematic models at all, this was a huge leap. But the leap was from a (sophisticated) system of folk belief to science. Similar leaps were taken in chemistry and biology much later and these too were from systems of folk belief (albeit less sophisticated) to science. None of them were instigated by the works of Francis Bacon.
Nice essay but I think you’d benefit from studying the history of science a bit more. Thomas Kuhn’s view of paradigms overturning one another is not supported; since Kepler and Galileo it has been almost wholly cumulative. You get can get Kepler’s and Galileo’s laws from Newton’s and you can get Kepler’s and Galileo’s and Newton’s from Einstein’s; the surprises have largely been interpretive. Most of the limitations of Galileo’s and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws were known within the framework of those systems. The sense in which the contemporaries of, say, Newton thought that the Newtonian system was “certain” was as a philosophical extension of his science: they thought the necessary extensions needed to address the problems would be broadly “Newtonian” in nature. Theirs was a failure of speculation and not science.
The “revolutions” have only been from systems of folk belief (sometimes sophisticated derivatives like Aristotelian thought) to modern science. Aristotle was not a mathematician of any sort or an experimentalist of any sort; that is, he was not in any way a scientist. His system was subject to sophisticated extension by the Alexandrian Greeks (notably Ptolemy used it to create a mathematical system for astronomy) and the Scholastics. For them, mathematics meant Euclidean geometry, and the Scholastics had only parts of it: they did not have the means to do quantitative analysis of any sophistication. No experiments were performed. There are many books published about Greek “science,” Islamic “science,” Medieval “science”; they’re all talking about Aristotle’s “physics” (the only relation with modern physics is the word), which contained no mathematics, no experiments and virtually no observations (although Aristotle extolled the virtues of observation in his methodology, he did not practice what he preached, and neither did his followers).
What Kepler and Galileo brought to the table was a taste for precision in measurement and the willingness to move straight from measurement to mathematical manipulation without taking an unnecessary detour through Aristotelian philosophy (or any philosophy). (Note that Copernicus was still operating in the Aristotelian tradition; he simply moved us out to one of the rotating spheres from our place in the center. Many people overlook Kepler’s achievement because they don’t realize there was then no concept of an orbit; the circular motion was due to astronomical objects being implanted in spinning spheres. Moving to elliptical motions was probably a bigger conceptual leap than moving away from geocentricism.) Given that their contemporaries were measuring nothing (except astronomers), and rarely creating mathematic models at all, this was a huge leap. But the leap was from a (sophisticated) system of folk belief to science. Similar leaps were taken in chemistry and biology much later and these too were from systems of folk belief (albeit less sophisticated) to science. None of them were instigated by the works of Francis Bacon.