The year in which Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus (1543) is taken to be the

starting point of the Scientific Revolution, the culmination of this revolution is marked by

another historic work, Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)

popularly known as simply Principia. A change from the hierarchical cosmology of Aristotle

to the deterministic “clockwork universe'' of Newton. Rupert Hall, whose books The

Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude”, was the

most popular book in the 70s and 80s described this period as “formation of the modern

scientific attitude”. Alexander Kyoré one of the most important French philosopher of

science of the nineteenth-century who coined the very term “scientific revolution”

characterizes this period in several ways such as “secularization of consciousness”, a turning

away from the “transcendent goals to imminent aims”, a discovery of man's “essential

subjectivity”, a substitution from the objectivism of the medievals to subjectivism that borne

out of this period.

One such characterization that captures this change is the “astronomical-mechanical change”

in natural philosophy during this period. This change could be simplified into two seminal

questions whose answers or theories in natural philosophy changed during this period.

1. How is our universe arranged? ( astronomy )

2. How do changes in the world occur? (Mechanics)

The third question we are going to posit is related to how this alleged revolution is

characterized epistemologically as a “ descriptive concept”. How accurate is the concept that

characterizes this change in natural philosophy.? (epistemology)

From Antiquity, Aristotelian physics combined with the astronomy of Ptolemy had provided

the answer to the first two of the seminal questions in natural philosophy. Together with its

astronomical system its physics also was integrated with Christianity in the Medieval age in

the form of scholasticism. Their natural philosophy and mode of explanation became

integrated into Christian theology and its doctrinal beliefs.

“The Aristotelian cosmology and physics, in other words, the arrangement of the heavenly

bodies and their motion was inextricably linked.” “The motion of the objects was determined

by their inherent nature.” Earth at the centre is the realm of change and corruption. Motion

therein is rectilinear, everything moved toward the center and sought “the natural position” of

rest where it takes push or a pull to keep something moving. The cosmological system held

earth at the centre, “ surrounded by concentric rings that hold different planets that go around

the earth, including the Sun, in a perfectly circular path directly opposite to the way objects

move on the earth. This cosmological system with modifications of epicycles by Ptolemy,

who considered it to be mathematically true, provided a system for astronomical observations

and calendrical calculations.

This intricately linked astronomical-mechanical system was challenged by the moderns The

distinction between the lunar and the sublunar, especially in terms of motion was bridged by

modern natural philosophers; the figures who brought about this change were Copernicus,

Kepler, Galileo and Newton.

Copernicus' astronomical hypothesis of a heliocentric cosmological system in his “De

revolutionibus” or “De Revis” taken to be the first such step towards this more modern

natural philosophy.”The fundamental idea of Copernicus’ system was that the sun, not the
earth, is at (nearly) the centre of the universe (heliocentrism rather than geocentrism).” “The

earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours and is a planet, revolving around the sun

once in a year (geokinetic rather than geostatic).” It has also been argued by many historians

of science that the Copernican hypothesis, “as a calculating device, did no harm to the

Ptolemaic/Aristotelian cosmological system. As a physical hypothesis, however, it required a

wholly new understanding of all matter and all motion.”

The next bold step was taken by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) in 1610. He worked with the

data that was painstakingly collected by Tycho Brahe, the most influential astronomer of the

seventeenth century. Tycho himself proposed his astronomical geocentric system due to

errors found in the Copernicus’ model after his meticulous collection of astronomical data on

an Island gifted by the Danish King. It was most comprehensive and in terms of astronomical

calculations and predictions, the most popular amongst the three models. Kepler along with

Copernicus and contrary to Brahe believed in the physical truth of heliocentricity. Based on

Tycho’s sophisticated data Kepler concluded that celestial motion (the motion of the planets

around the sun) at least, were not perfect circles, but they were ellipses. He even made up the

“laws that described how fast the planets were moving at different parts of the circle of the

ellipse in relation to the period the time it takes to go around and the size of the elliptical

orbit.” “He described mathematically what these orbits looked like and how the planets

moved in elliptical orbits. But he gave us no physical explanation for why they move in these

orbits.” The philosophical implication is that the perfection of the sub-lunar world was

challenged.

“Galileo’s (1564 - 1642) contributions to the history of science fall under both astronomy and

physics.” Though he did not invent the telescope, he was the first one to point the telescope at
the sky and observe the planets and their motion. Three astronomical observations proved

detrimental to the encrusted tradition which held the perfection of the celestial realm. He

“discovered that Jupiter had moons circling it. The four moons that he named after the Medici

family. These moons were “ a miniature solar system, they represented moons of Jupiter

going around Jupiter in the same way the Earth's moon goes around the earth.” His discovery

of Jupiter's moon is a bit like what will happen when humanity perhaps discovers life on

some distant planet or star. The second observation was about the phases of Venus. It was

very difficult to explain that observation in terms of the Aristotelian Ptolemaic. The third

observation through his telescope was about the sunspots; there were blemishes\spots on the

surface of the sun. Here's the celestial body, and it's no longer perfect. These three

observations confirmed the notion that there was nothing special about the earth and also the

Copernican hypothesis that the sun was a solar system, at the centre with planets going

around it.

Galileo (1564 - 1642) was a real experimentalist. His greatest triumph was in mechanics. He

turned to the motion of the earth and did some experiments, provided a new understanding of

all matter, a new physics for the Copernican hypothesis, a step towards a new science of

mechanics which later was completed by Issac Newton. By doing physical and imagining

several thought experiments, e.g, dropping different objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa

and imagining a ball rolling on a trough, he was able to show the natural state of motion on

Earth isn't of rest; which Aristotelian physics held. The natural state of motion is straight-line

motion at a constant speed. The terrestrial motion that we normally observe is because of

friction and air resistance. In the natural state, the object will continue to move at a uniform

speed in a straight line. It is called the law of inertia and it is one of the fundamental

principles of classical physics.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is most famous for his laws of motion and his law of gravity. The

first law of motion is essentially the law of inertia which Galileo proposed and Newton

stipulated in formal terms. The second law is a meaty one. “The first law is the subset of the

second law.” It describes quantitatively (F=ma) how forces — pushes and pulls, cause

changes in motion. * Second law in the context of the first law. It says if f is zero if there's no

force, then a will be zero, there'll be no change in motion. "Newton's second law says if we

know how an object is accelerating if we know how its motion is changing,g, and we know

how it was initially moving, we can predict everything it's going to do." That is the "essence

of the clockwork universe idea." If we quantitatively know the forces that act on objects and

their positions, of every planet, atom, electron this principally makes the universe completely

deterministic hence "clockwork universe, a universe that once God or some initial random

event, or whatever it is, puts it into motion, the rest of it is completely determined.” The third

law of motion is about the conservation of momentum. In simpler words it states that if I push

a table it is going to push back on me with equal force. The point is, these three laws provide

a coherent whole that describes everything there is to know about motion, according to

Newton, according to classical physics.

Newton's other contribution which made him “master of those who knows” was his

enunciation of the law of universal gravitation in Book III of Principia. He was able to solve

a “host of observations and problems in celestial dynamics.” He mathematically showed the

three laws Kepler derived from observation.

Newton in a massive intuitive leap came with the idea of universal force of gravity. Newton

believed that every object in the universe (terrestrial or celestial) attracts every other object
with a force, a pull, that depends on how massive the two objects are and also on how far

apart they are. The enigma within the physical true heliocentric universe of how the planets

within the orbits move were solved through Newton's law of gravity.

How Newton renders the celestial and terrestrial motion as one. How come Apple falls on his

head, moves in a straight line while the moon moves around it. “What do both those motions

have in common?” “In both cases, Newton proposed that the objects being accelerated

deviated from straight-line constant speed motion, in a direction toward the earth (law of

inertia).” It's as though in both cases, there's a pull toward the earth acting on both those

objects.” In the case of the apple, the pull is causing the apple to move physically toward the

earth. In the case of the moon, the motion is not e moon come any closer to the earth, but it is

pulling it away from its straight-line path. The pull towards the earth isn't strong enough

because of the distance. It continues to follow the uniform straight motion with slight

deviation and answering.

“Newton realised something else with his universal gravitation.” He realised the possibility

that we could have objects in orbit.” Newton came up with the thought experiment. It

involved a giant mountain on top of the Earth. If you throw the ball or an object horizontally

from the top of the mountain. It would fall on the earth with a curved path. “But if I throw it

fast enough, here's what Newton's genius again realised: it could be falling toward the earth at

exactly the same rate that the earth is, falling away underneath it because the earth is curved.”

“It would go in a circular path and come right back to its starting point. And absent air

resistance or other factors that 6 would tend to slow it down.” That ball that we threw would

continue in a circular orbit around the Earth forever.” “That was Newton's realisation that we

could perhaps put artificial satellites in orbit.”

“Newton took his newly discovered universal law of gravitation and said to himself, what

kind of paths particularly a planet follows as it moves in the vicinity of the Sun subject to its

gravitational force, which gets stronger as it gets closer to the sun and weaker as it gets

further away.” “Newton said, '' How do I figure that out?” “Well, he discovered he didn't

know how to figure that out.” “So he had to invent the branch of mathematics that it takes to

figure that out.”That branch of mathematics is called calculus.”

“Newton had a real incentive to invent calculus, which was also independently invented by

Leibniz.” “But Newton invented calculus because he wanted to understand how his universal

gravitation would describe the motions of planets.” “Low and behold, out of that

mathematics came the prediction that the motion to planets should be elliptical orbits, the sun

should be at one focus of the ellipse.” “The laws that Kepler had described how fast the

planets move around the sun, how much area they sweep out, the period in relation to the

radius of the of the orbit, the size of the elliptical orbit, all those laws that Kepler had

described, with no physical basis, fell out of Newton's universal gravitation.”

“What Newton has done is the first of the several great syntheses that characterize modern

science.” He took seemingly disparate regions, areas, and fields such as astronomy, and

terrestrial physics, and united them. “These disparate fields are understood as aspects of the

same thing.” “What Venus is doing, and its motion around the sun can be understood as the

same thing as what the Apple is doing when it falls on Newton's head.” This obliteration of

the distinction is also called Galilean relativity or Newtonian relativity.” “It states what I just

said, it says the laws of motion are the same for anyone provided they're in uniform motion.”

The distinction between the lunar and the sub-lunar was bridged.
Now we turn to the third question posited at the beginning of the chapter about the accuracy

of the concept that has been employed to characterize this alleged ‘drastic change’ in the

knowledge of the natural world. The phrase scientific revolution symbolizes one such

concept with an underlying epistemological concept that has been used as a “descriptive

historiographical concept” that seeks to capture the development of natural philosophy in the

17th century.

Epistemological rupture or epistemological break undergirds the historiographical concept of

the Scientific Revolution. It is a notion introduced by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

“The concept of epistemological break comes from the tradition of French philosophy of

science which was practised during the first half of the twentieth century at the Collége de

France. Its cultivators were philosophers such as Canguilhem, Bachelard, Koyre, etc.” 2.

This notion seeks to lay bare the manner of development of knowledge in the history of

science.

This ingenious concept was developed by Bachelard as a critical tool against Auguste

Comte’s positivism which considered science as a story of continual progress throughout

history. “To Bachelard, development of scientific knowledge is a discontinuous process. The

model of development that favoured continuity such as Comte and Emile Meyerson was too

simplistic for Bachelard. “According to Bachelard, it is not possible to explain Einstein’s

theory of relativity as developing out of Newtonian physics. New doctrines did not develop

out of the old, says Bachelard, ‘but rather, the new enveloped the old’.” “Bachelard also

referred to this ‘mutations’ or ‘large-scale discontinuities' in development of the conceptual

structure of science.”
Koyré who shared Behlardian epistemological outlook, used this critical concept and also

employed this to the development of natural philosophy in the 17th century and coined the

term “scientific revolution”. He referred to this ‘drastic change’ from the Aristotelian

hierarchical universe to the Newtonian clockwork universe as an epistemological break

between two theories of the natural world. Koyre enunciated this in Etudes Galilèennes

(1939) which was his first major philosophy of science work. “Koyré affirms that he is

concerned with 'une véritable mutation de l'intellect humain,' in the sense of Bachelard. What

is in question, therefore, is not merely a development or growth of knowledge but rather a

transformation of thinking about the universe.” He wrote, “The scientific revolution of the

seventeenth century was, without doubt, a mutation…It was a profound intellectual

transformation of which modern physics… was both expression and fruit.”

There are other accompanying convictions that are foundational to this characterization of

modern science as epistemological rapture in the history of science. Koyré considered this

this transformation is unique to science and does not depend on social factors, technological

ambitions of society or any spiritual change in the “concept of man”. He identifies la science

moderne as being limited to physique classier. “In his writings he appears to grant

overwhelming importance to the origin of classical physics as holding the unique key to the

whole history of modern science.” By classical physics he meant, theoretical knowledge, the

process of mathematization of natural phenomena, with geometry, and demonstration by way

of logical deductive proofs as the paradigmatic model of knowledge that brought this

transformation. Koyré considered this transformation as only conceptual: “En conséquence,

l'histoire de cette progression de la science moderne devrait être consacrée à son aspect

thiorique au moins autant qu'à son aspect expérimental.” (“Pure empiricism - and even
"experimental philosophy" - leads nowhere; and it is not by renouncing the apparently

inaccessible and useless goal of knowing the real (my emphasis), but on the contrary by

pursuing it with boldness that science progresses”). This undermines the role of the concerte,

experimental form of knowledge and its role in modern science. The significance of the “men

of Renaissance” including the figures held widely to be the fathers of modern science

including Galileo becomes a matter of concern.

Bachelard’s concept of the epistemological rapture is based on his vision of “historical

epistemology” as a kind of a psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. In his two works on the

philosophy of science: “Le Nouvel esprit scientifique (The New Scientific Spirit, 1934) and

La formation de l'esprit scientifique (The Formation of the Scientific Mind, 1938).” he tried

to demonstrate progress in science is “blocked by a certain type of mental patterns creating

epistemological obstacles”. As a veritable poet of epistemology, he argues for the active role

of epistemology to bring down and overcome such mental constructs that create hurdles in

the way of scientific development. In the later stage of this overcoming the epistemological

rupture, unconscious/unthought structures are thoroughly destroyed. In the context of the

development of natural philosophy in the 17th century the example of such obstacles or

“principles of division” could be celestial versus terrestrial motion of finite versus infinite

universe.

The term “epistemological break” that underlined Bachelard’s philosophy of science the term

itself was never used by him. It became popular through another French philosopher of the

twentieth century, Louis Althusser. Althusser, while attempting to comprehend Marxist

ideology under the structuralist influence, pointed to Marx’s “transaction from Feuerbach

“humanist problematic” found in his early work of Economic and Philosophical Manuscript
(1844) to his own historical-materialist problematic during found in Das Capital as break or

rupture between the young and mature Marx. By problematic he meant “theoretical structure”

or a “conceptual framework”. For Althusser, Marx's works stand in the way of practice of his

ideology. Althusser argued that Marx “humanist problematic” in where he’ was a philosopher

of alienation was written under the influence of Fauerbach and that theoretical framework

was later abandoned by more scientific Marx.

The theoretical framework and the conceptual schemes e.g. “paradigm” of Thomas Kuhn

“problematic” of Althusser and the “epistemé” of Michel Foucault were influenced by

Bachelard’s concept of epistemological rupture as an abstract critical tool to define the

theoretical development which in the case of Bachelard was scientific knowledge in the

history of science.

This brings us to the role of epistemology in the production of the concepts. These concepts

are not mere abstract entities but they are concrete, technical, and can become pervasive

enough to influence pedagogical activity; with social and cultural ramifications. The

scientific revolution is one such “historiographical concept” in the history of natural

philosophy. Based on these concepts such as Bachelardian epistemological rupture we link or

delink prior developments and discoveries to the one that succeeded them. In the case of the

scientific Revolution and its underlying concept of an epistemological break or rupture it

implies a discontinuity with all the previous theories and explanation of phenomena of the

past. This is what the dissertation seeks to challenge in the next two chapters.