The Scientific Revolution: Context and Foundations

The Scientific Revolution unfolded across roughly a century and a half, conventionally dated from 1543, the year Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, to 1687, when Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. Its roots lay in Renaissance humanism, which had recovered classical Greek mathematical texts by authors such as Archimedes and Euclid, works that drove new quantitative approaches to nature even as the printing press allowed the resulting theories to spread and be debated rapidly across Europe. At the outset, the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition still dominated European universities, but that authority was being eroded from several directions at once: the growth of long-distance exploration created pressing practical needs for accurate navigation and cartography, courts and universities increasingly financed instruments and observations of growing sophistication, and advances in algebra and trigonometry made astronomical and physical calculations far more precise.