It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

In 1543, Copernicus proposed that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun, and sixty years later his scientific heirs launched the Scientific Revolution. Right? In recent years this old standby of the history of Western science has come under fire from historians who claim that the Copernican Revolution had nothing to do with the Scientific Revolution, which wasn't revolutionary anyway, since science did not suddenly become modern around 1600. Talking boldly past this academic tempest, social theorist Howard Margolis makes the assertion, informed by common sense, that obviously something did happen around 1600 and by studying it we can shed light on the nature of discovery itself. A fresh look at the Scientific Revolution reveals the mental habits that can lead even great thinkers to adhere passionately to an idea that has no rational basis and keep them from seeing how to get at the truth that is in front of them - a phenomenon that is obviously not limited to the 17th Century. Looking back four centuries later, it's apparent to us that the Sun is the center around which the planets and stars revolve, and indeed, this idea had been proposed by Aristarchus almost two millenia before Copernicus. All the physical evidence necessary to make a heliocentric hypothesis convincing had been available for centuries. So what was it about Copernicus that enabled him to construct his revolutionary system when countless brilliant minds before him had failed to see it? Margolis argues that Copernicus stumbled on a method of inquiry, what he calls "oblique inquiry," that led him to the problem in a new way. Two generations later, Stevin, Gilbert, Kepler and Galileo were following his example in an extraordinary burst of discovery that yielded such landmark results as the laws of planetary motion, the law of free fall, and the realization that the Earth is a magnet. Margolis argues persuasively that this method of "around-the-corner" discovery led directly to modern science.

About the Author :
Howard Margolis is a professor in the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the Fishbein Center for History of Science at the University of Chicago. He has held research appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, publishing extensively on cognition, public policy, history of science, and mathematical models of social choice.