Whose Revolution is it Anyway?

The familiar story of the Scientific Revolution runs from Copernicus to Newton, but the full story extends far beyond Europe, beyond men, and beyond the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The universe doesn't revolve around you. And by you, we mean your planet. That's common knowledge now, but we used to think Earth was the center of the universe, and that the universe was made up of simple elements like earth, water, air and fire. Then we had the Scientific Revolution and boom, there are 118 elements, penicillin, a moon landing, and app-based scooters on every street.

Or that's the usual story, anyway. The Scientific Revolution is often portrayed as a frenzy of amazing discoveries by brilliant men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are bookended on one end by Copernicus (1473-1543 CE) and Newton (1643-1727 CE) on the other.

And these smart guys did more than think up good ideas—they are said to have revolutionized our thinking and our world. Copernicus, for example, put the sun at the center of the cosmos, and Newton transformed how we think about motion, force and gravity. He was inspired, the story goes, by an apple falling on his head.

But wait a minute. Is that really how it happened? Was the Scientific Revolution a parade of great male, European scientists? Was it as revolutionary as the familiar historical narratives describe? And what effects did it have on the world?

OK, it was revolutionary. Kind of. There were many continuities with earlier historical periods. We're sometimes told that the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution emerged out of the mucky medieval "Dark Ages," when we've been told ignorance prevailed. But women and men did plenty of intellectual and scientific stuff during the medieval period, laying the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution.

For that matter, humans have always experimented and calculated—the hallmarks of the Scientific Revolution. Archaeologists have even found evidence of astronomical observations from the Neolithic period. So while experimentation and mathematical models took on a new form during the Scientific Revolution, they were not revolutionary practices.

Individual scientific pursuits may have had their own revolutions, but most of the change was slow and fragmented. Throughout these two centuries, people maintained many of the same ideas, and religion continued to influence scientific thinking. But what really made the Scientific Revolution so revolutionary was the scale of it. People had been experimenting and sharing ideas here and there for millennia, and now it was happening at a much larger, unprecedented scale. Technologies like the printing press and long-distance navigational tools helped create massive networks, where ideas could collide and cross-pollinate. There was simply more information, and it was being absorbed and evaluated by an even larger community.

So far, we've mentioned only European scholars, and the Scientific Revolution has traditionally been described as a European affair. More recently, however, historians question that narrative by looking for the global story. It turns out gravity, starry skies and insects are observable in all parts of the world.

The first thing to remember is that those so-called "Dark Ages" were pretty bright outside of Europe. (In fact, they weren't that dark inside of Europe either.) A lively intellectual life in both the Islamic world and China suggests, as many scholars note, direct and indirect global links to the Scientific Revolution. Even the Greek sources that inspired modern science and reason had to travel through the Islamic world to get back to Europe. Scholars in cities like Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad took on massive projects to translate ancient sources from Greek and other languages into Arabic.

Many Scientific Revolution achievements also have non-European antecedents (things that came before). Indian ideas about mathematical techniques inspired the modern system of mathematical proofs, some research suggests. Others point to Arab and Persian astronomers' contributions to the Copernican system. These are specific examples of knowledge transfer, but others argue there were broader intellectual shifts that paved the way. A heliocentric (sun-centered) model was in the making for a while. Intellectuals across Asia had been questioning an Earth-centric model for centuries, creating space for Copernicus to elaborate his new system.

But this is a pretty big historical debate. Some scholars still think there was something uniquely European about the Scientific Revolution. Many of these same scholars argue that parallel ideas across cultures don't necessarily mean they reached and influenced European thinkers. Yet, others believe these cross-cultural influences must have existed, given the extensive networks and connections across Afro-Eurasia at the time. Though scholars debate the specifics, there's a general consensus that the European Scientific Revolution relied on earlier knowledge systems both within and outside of Europe.

Even though it had a wide geographic spread—in origins and effects—the Scientific Revolution was generally limited to a small class of people. Most were elite and highly educated. And half the population was excluded, as women weren't usually given access to scientific communities. There are a few significant exceptions, like French mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet. She was famous for her French translation of and commentary on Newton's work. Her commentary led to robust debates about the conservation of energy—the idea that energy is neither created nor destroyed—which helped clarify the idea and promote Newton's principles across Europe. But there were other women, usually from the upper to middle classes, who participated as mathematicians, naturalists, astronomers, chemists and scientific illustrators.

Then, as science became a formal institution and a profession, it became even harder for women to participate. This had not been the case before, when things like astronomical observation were mostly done in private homes and were open to women. Experimental science was also considered something of a hobby, like cooking—not as rigorous as the "manly" scholastic task of learning ancient Greek and Latin. But when science became regarded as an important, respected profession, women were excluded with the subtly of a sign on a treehouse reading: "No Girls Allowed." In fact, the Royal Society of London's stated purpose was to advance "Masculine Philosophy."

Women were routinely denied access to spaces like this, as well as universities. This further cemented ideas about what kind of knowledge was legitimate and who could make it. Women were considered too emotional and unscientific in their thinking to produce objective truth. Despite this severely limited access, women continued to make important contributions to science.

Ideas from the Scientific Revolution often reinforced gender and racial hierarchies. They perpetuated the metaphor of nature as a feminine force, chaotic and needing to be conquered and controlled. These led to ideas about how to control the body and reproduction. Racial others were also grouped into the world of disorderly nature—and ideas about race emerged. Just as some scientists sought to classify plants and animals, scientists also attempted to classify humans according to skin color, beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution. This idea was further developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often to justify imperialism and slavery.

The Scientific Revolution led to the creation of new knowledge systems, social hierarchies, and networks of thinkers. It also affected production and distribution. But it's tricky to draw a direct, causal link. People started to think about nature as machinelike and orderly, and they understood it as something that could be dominated and manipulated. But did that directly cause the Industrial Revolution?

On the one hand, the Scientific Revolution was all high theory—not applied to actual devices and machines. The people who invented key industrial technologies weren't slogging through Newton's notoriously difficult texts. Most were not scholars at all, and had been educated only through practical apprenticeships. In fact, in many cases, the inventions came before the theory. For instance, scientists came up with the second law of thermodynamics by studying Watt's engine!

But in general, people were better educated, and scientists and industrialists did collaborate. The steam engine would never have taken off were it not for the partnership between the engineer James Watt and industrialist Matthew Boulton.

So, as historians, we can't exactly use a scientist's precision in showing the links between the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution. But that's because production and distribution on the scale of the Industrial Revolution is incredibly complex. The links look less like single threads and more like several overlapping spiderwebs. But without a doubt, the Scientific Revolution made the Industrial Revolution possible. We see how historical events depend on each other and on certain conditions being in place. Medieval European, Muslim, Chinese and Indian scholars created the conditions for the Scientific Revolution by illuminating many ideas. Similarly, the Scientific Revolution lit a path that—centuries later, with the help of a lot of steam and coal power, money, and labor—led to the Industrial Revolution.