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Week 6 (Mechanical Philosophy and the Enlightenment)
The Scientific Revolution
- We get things that start to resemble the modern scientific method
- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
- Many new tools for experiments
- Beginnings of scientific journals and groups
- Galileo was very interested in motion and finding the natural laws of the universe
- He discovered parabolic motion
- Acceleration down an inclined plane
- Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
- Acquire knowledge by doubting and build it back up by geometric axioms.
- Contributes to the debate about “what is matter?”
- Does it extend in space?
- Can vacuums exist?
- Matter is inert stuff that ends in space
- No vacuums exist, everything is matter that is interacting
- God put the world into motion in the beginning, and it has stayed the same since.
- Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655)
- Debated with Descartes on whether God acts upon the world
- This was due to the new physics and how God relates to it
- The world becomes debated as a machine as people get more comfortable with it
- Clock Metaphor
- It is mathematical
- Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
- One of the fathers of modern chemistry
- Famous for writing many things
- Is very into experimental philosophy
- Very into his faith
- Many experiments were performed on the properties of air and vacuums.
- Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
- Lots of work in optics
- Three laws of physics
- Unconventional theology
- Tremendously improved the telescope
- Interested in alchemy
- Historians are skeptical about the role of fruit in him developing calculus and how gravity works
