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Science and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Science and Society in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Author:Alan Smith The scientific advances of the 16th and 17th centuries produced a revolutionary reshaping of man's view of the universe and of his place in it. In his lucid and succinct account, Dr. Smith discusses and analyzes the dramatic discoveries of those centuries and their effect on contemporary society. He begins with the dominance of Aristotle in ph... more »ysics and astronomy and of Galen in medicine. This dominance was gradually overthrown by the new scientific methodology and instrumentation, and by the work of individual great scientists--Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler and Galileo. It was Newton, however, who in his Principia constructed a theory that explained the physical structure of the universe and unified the phenomena of earth and heaven, which had been entirely separate in the Aristotelian synthesis. But Dr. Smith's conclusion is somber, for he argues that the first scientific revolution created an even wider gap between the economic elites of Europe and ordinary men and between the assumptions of the intelligentsia and the uneducated.« less