The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution

On April 8, 1341, Francesco Petrarch, in the Senate Palace on Rome’s Capitoline Hill, delivered a speech on the meaning and purpose of poetry. Citing only ancient classical authors, he broke the centuries-old tradition of seeking arguments in sacred scripture. This event marked a precedent in the history of Medieval Europe, which had been shrouded in a thousand-year darkness of religious superstition.

Petrarch himself called this period the Dark Ages, which ended with the speech of the Florentine poet. A new era began—the Renaissance, a revival of ancient science and art.

Humanism, born of this era, declared humanity the center of the universe, comparing it to God himself. “Above all else, the genius of man… the unique and outstanding abilities of the human mind,” proclaimed Giannozzo Manetti.

Scholasticism, the medieval religious philosophy that combined theology with Aristotelianism and sought to give theology a scientific appearance, gave way to the teachings of Socrates. This philosopher, who made humanity the main subject of philosophical inquiry, became one of the founders of Western philosophy.

The European Renaissance, born in northern Italy, became the universal heritage of humanity, with its ideal being the homo universalis. The universal person, or polymath, capable of anything they desired, held interests that spanned various fields of science, philosophy, and art.

Such individuals were not only physicists, astronomers, sculptors, architects, and engineers but also geologists, painters, philosophers, and humanists like Leonardo. They were poets, painters, architects, thinkers, engineers, and sculptors like Michelangelo or Galileo, who created in the languages of mathematics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy.

This new way of thinking—humanism, secularism, reason, and skepticism—changed the course of history. The Renaissance paved the way for another grand event in the history of Europe and all humanity: the Scientific Revolution.

The masterpiece of Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), published in 1543, began the triumphant march of science through the Old World. Copernicus, who stopped the Sun and moved the Earth, laid the foundation for a new period in world history by reviving and substantiating the heliocentric system.

The Scientific Revolution resulted from the development of natural and exact sciences, particularly mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology.

Galileo stated that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, and its symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.” His support of Copernicus’s heliocentric model brought him into conflict with the Church, which held that the Earth was the center of the universe. Forced by the Church to renounce his theory, Galileo still famously declared, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves!”).

Johannes Kepler, based on Tycho Brahe’s observations, described the orbital motion of planets around the Sun and significantly improved Copernicus’s model of the solar system. Along with Newton’s mathematical theories, Kepler’s laws became the cornerstone of modern physics and astronomy. Newton’s three laws of mechanics and the law of universal gravitation complemented Galileo’s mechanics, forming a solid foundation for classical mechanics.

Other luminaries of the era included Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern human anatomy; Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the creator of microbiology and bacteriology; Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier, the founders of modern chemistry; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who made significant contributions to mathematics, physics, philosophy, and logic; and Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Carl Linnaeus, William Gilbert, John Dalton, Mikhail Lomonosov, and others.

The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized publishing. Science became accessible to the masses, and books were no longer a privilege of the wealthy alone.

The Scientific Revolution changed humanity’s understanding of the world and its way of thinking. It enabled humanity to speak the language of nature, to harness it, to influence chance, and to find its place in the universe while constructing its own destiny. Francis Bacon and René Descartes played critical roles in shaping the scientific method, which remains the standard for distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific, the rational from the irrational.

The core principles of the scientific method—systematic observation, experimentation, and an objective approach to phenomena—are the fundamental criteria for the validity of any theory.

Since the 16th century, empiricism became the foundation of the scientific method and natural philosophy, with experience and experimental evidence as its primary criteria for truth. The methods of empirical research included observation, hypothesis and theory formulation, experimentation, and evaluation. Leading empiricists of the era were Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, and David Hume.

The intellectual rival of empiricism was rationalism, which held reason, intellect, and deduction as its criteria for truth. Prominent representatives of rationalism included Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. However, the boundaries between rationalism and empiricism were blurred, and most thinkers of the era used methods from both.

Humanism, the fruit of the Renaissance, placed the individual at the center of the universe and freed them from the chains of religious superstition. This free reason and intellect became the catalyst for a revolution in science. This revolution was followed by the Reformation, which split the Church, and the Age of Enlightenment, the century of reason, which laid the foundation for humanity’s conquest of nature through industrialization.

Undoubtedly, subsequent scientific revolutions associated with the names of geniuses such as Pierre-Simon Laplace, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Alan Turing, James Watson, Francis Crick, and others followed.

Over the last half-century, humanity has uncovered the structure of DNA, sent probes beyond the solar system, created an artificial heart, and developed supercomputers capable of performing 20 quadrillion operations per second, endowing machines with intelligence. Science has enabled humanity to become the master of its own destiny, opening the path to the limitless resources of the boundless universe.