Physics Timeline

JE comment:  only about 2% of the U.S. population sees the Milky Way in a dark sky whenever there are no clouds, the atmosphere is clear, and the moon is not present.  The image is close to what is seen, but the real-life impression is a grander thing than the image because one swivels his head up and around, seeing the various parts of the Milky Way.  One must be 80 miles from shopping centers, airports, and city centers and suburbs.

It is no wonder that the ancients were impressed with the Milky Way, and they saw it every clear night because there was no electric light.  Surely some looked night after night for any changes in the Milky Way and found it to be static.

1258  end to the Islamic Golden Age as Mongols sack Baghdad.    One reason given for the scientific decline of the Muslim world was when the orthodox Ash'ari school of theology challenged the more rational Mu'tazili school of theology, with al-Ghazali's The Incoherence of the Philosophers being the most notable example.  Recent scholarship has questioned this traditional view, however, with a number of scholars pointing out that the Ash'ari school supported science but were only opposed to speculative philosophy and that some of the greatest Muslim scientists such as Alhazen, Biruni, Ibn al-Nafis and Ibn Khaldun were themselves followers of the Ash'ari school.  Emilie Savage-Smith also pointed out that Al-Ghazali's positive views towards medicine, particularly anatomy, were a source of encouragement for the increased use of dissection by Muslim physicians.

    Other reasons for the decline of Islamic science include conflicts between the Sunni and Shia Muslims, and invasions by Crusaders and Mongols on Islamic lands between the 11th and 13th centuries, especially the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.     However, Y. Ziedan has pointed out that the sack of Baghdad in 1258 was followed by intense scientific activity across Damascus and Cairo, as many Muslim scholars wrote huge encyclopedias (including an 80-volume medical encyclopedia by Ibn al-Nafis) in an attempt to preserve the scientific heritage of the Islamic world and cope with the loss of Baghdad.

    Another reason given for the decline of Islamic science is the disruption to the cycle of equity based on Ibn Khaldun's famous model of Asabiyyah (the rise and fall of civilizations), which points to the decline being mainly due to political and economic factors rather than religious factors.  With the fall of Islamic Spain in 1492, the scientific and technological initiative has long been assumed by the Europeans who laid the foundations for Europe's Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.   New Oxford Review July 2014 p. 44 says it was from science incompatible with faith.

1260  Aquinas has lasting influence on Roman Catholic theology.  His view of sin is that it diminishes the natural inclination to virtue.  (This is contrary to the view that man's inclinations are toward evil.)  Aquinas debates Islam.  Aquinas' writing supports the 1870 doctrine of the infallibility of the pope.  Aquinas esteems Aristotle and reason.

    Roman Catholic scholars, enamored of Aristotle, cause problems:  Albert the Great and his student Thomas Aquinas...sought to reconcile Christian thought with Aristotle, whom they and other scholastic thinkers referred to simply as The Philosopher. Under the aegis of the Church, Aristotelian ideas achieved such prominence and such propriety as to be assimilated to God-given gospel, to be overturned [300 years] later by pioneers like Galileo (in this time line, see 1586, 1597), Descartes (1637), and Newton (1666).  Aristotle's many wrong ideas, propelled by Catholics, cause grief for many.  https://outre-monde.com/2010/08/29/aristotles-influence/   Aquinas brings in Aristotle's ideas when the Bible has little to contribute to debates.    Aristotle will be condemned by Martin Luther, see 1517 in this time line.  Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

        New Oxford Review June 2020 p. 40  Peter Redpath reads much or all of Aquinas in the Latin and shows that Aquinas is very different from the common views.  Aquinas is distinguished from Enlightenment thinkers (sophists, not philosophers, like Descartes, Kant, Rousseau, Locke).  Aquinas deals with Creation as a done deal, and moves on to what the soul encounters, "sensory data" and "objectively existing, mind-independent stuff with which the human soul forms a relationship" with.  A person can study truth and find that Truth is in God.  Since Descartes, "philosophers" have cut God out of their studies.  Redpath says that Aquinas interpreted Aristotle the Greek (died 322 B.C.) to make Aristotle intelligible.  Redpath in turn interprets the convoluted writings of Aquinas.  "To lop off man's royal destiny as heir to the Kingdom of Heaven is to destroy everything about him that makes him who he really is.  The horrors of the Enlightenment" come from men hiding behind animal-like caricatures.  Redpath decries five centuries of Enlightment thinking, the "crumbling remains of modernity gone mad." 

1271  Marco Polo leaves Venice for China

https://probe.org/the-enlightenment-and-belief-in-god/   "Even more doubt came from discovery of non-European societies...a much more direct challenge to traditional Christian beliefs than any which seemed likely to come from the scientists.”  Norman Hampson:  the unknown was merely the undiscovered, and the general assumption–unprecedented in the Christian era–that man was to a great extent the master of his own destiny.

1300s  the polished, hard, finely jointed limestone casing of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, 22 acres of it, 100" thick, is looted to rebuild Arab palaces in El Kaherah (Cairo) after earthquake.  The coarser limestone blocks, the ones seen today, remain, whereas the casing had given smooth, flat surfaces to the entire pyramid.

1300  European tower windmills are in use for drainage, milling, sawing wood

1300 more or less   Little Ice Age starts, see Wikipedia       Ends after 1850    Little Ice Age associated with Black Death, Protestant Revolution, Thirty Years' War, New Oxford Review Dec 2019 p. 10

1302  In England, France, and Spain, in conflict between church and crown revolving around financing the church and especially because Muslims hold so much of France, Pope Boniface declares "submission on the part of every person to the bishop of Rome is altogether necessary for salvation"

1303  big earthquakde at Egyptian Pyramids loosens the smooth casing stones.  Looters steal most for re-use in new buildings.

1309  The exile of the Roman Catholic pope to Avignon in France from Rome.  Bishop Schneider's third of four Catholic crises, three different men claimed to be legitimate popes. The ordeal required two Church councils.  "Started the crisis of the Renaissance papacy," Bishop Schneider asserts, "the spirit of the world in this time — the pagan humanism."  The next of Schneider's crises is not Martin Luther since Luther caused a crisis outside the Catholic church.  His fourth crisis is modern anthropocentric relativism, "doctrinal, moral and tremendous liturgical anarchy."  Denial of divinity.

1340  in a century of Mongol invasions through Asia, 11 million to 40 million die.  Genghis Khan offers this reflection on the pleasures of life: “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.”  http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-bad-were-mongols.html         In India, Mongol warriors make captives dig holes, bury captives to the waist, and practice archery.  Some Hindu cities make no resistance.

1345  Petrarch rediscovers Cicero's letters, starts the 14th-century renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture.  Tadeusz Zieliński:  "the Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity.  See 1350.  

1347  Plague or Black Death arrives in Sicily on trading ships from the Black Sea.  Bacterium spread by fleas of rats, infects people & livestock, spreads through air.  In 9 months, in Paris, London, & Rome. A third of Europe dies.

1350  Petrarch makes his first influential convert to the cause of classical studies. He is visited by an admirer, Boccaccio, nine years younger than himself.  The encounter changes Boccaccio's life. He is in the middle of writing the work for which he is now famous, the Decameron. After completing it, he abandons Italian literature - writing henceforth only in Latin and devoting himself to tracking down original manuscripts of classical texts.  Followers of Petrarch visit ancient monastery libraries in search of forgotten Latin manuscripts. They travel to Constantinople to bring back trunksload of Greek parchments. They clamber among ancient ruins to note the inscriptions.

1360  Nicole Oresme finds a part of calculus:  graphing speed vs time, area is distance moved.     Proves divergence of the harmonic series, considered by many to be a high point of medieval mathematics.  This series is 1+1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + ...      It diverges very slowly.  If you do this on a spreadsheet, divergence is only seen when you do XY plot and make horizontal scale logarithmic.  Sum of 5000 terms is only getting to 9.

1378 or so   Wycliffe in England declares that salvation is not by membership in a visible church or mediation by a priest, but by election by God.  Sets the stage for the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of believers.  See 1517, Luther, not those who would achieve it actively by good works,   See 1580  Anabaptists and the gathered church

        Doctrine on this point needs to come from the Bible.  https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/protestant-objections/can-we-lose-our-salvation.html

"Once saved, always saved" is denied in this web site.  "John 3:16 and Romans 10:9-18 in isolation and out of context."  "One of the clearest teachings there is in Sacred Scripture when it comes to differences between Catholic and Protestant beliefs.  For starters, St John teaches that there is something called "mortal" or deadly sin ... 'If any one sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not mortal.  There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray for that.' 1 John 5:16."      Wikipedia, Perseverance of the saints

1385  cannon on wheels in use on European battlefields;  soon, grapeshot is used to slaughter troops

1415  Filippo Brunelleschi studies the ruins of classical Rome, with a view to rediscovering classical architecture.  The ruins in Italy and Greece had been fearful, haunting, and mysterious, their origins unknown before the printing press (1440) allows easy dissemination of new compilations from ancient texts.  See 1350, Boccaccio.

1431  At the trial of Joan of Arc, the judges proclaim, “This woman sins when she says she’s certain of being received into Paradise. As if she were already a partaker of glory.  For, on this earthly journey, no pilgrim knows if he’s worthy of glory or of punishment.  Which the Sovereign Judge alone can tell.”  Their statement is in ignorance of the short letters of John in the New Testament.  See 1440 for ignorance of what is in the Bible.

1440  German Gutenberg adapts the Chinese & Korean printing press.  Asians had already used movable type, metal molds and alloys.  Inks are oil based.  Mass production of printed books follows rapidly.       Text of the Bible is printed in German and English...feeding frenzy amongst the literate who learn that what the Holy Roman Empire had forced on them as if it were taught by Jesus himself, was nowhere in the Bible.  Protests from those who no longer believe that the papacy has final say in everything spiritual or historical. Thousands leave the Catholic Church, refuse to pay papal taxes, the war of ideas begins in earnest. The papacy panics as their power and influence over the "truth" wanes...Inquisition and the school of Higher Criticism.

New Oxford Review March 2015 p. 42 Thomas Nelson's review of The Book that Made Your World:  How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization.  "Why, then, didn't printing have the momentous effect in China or Korea that it had in the West?  Mangalwadi writes, 'Printing and books did not reform [Asia] because our religious philosophies undermined reason' ... none of these [Asian] cultures had a god like the God of the Bible, who is interested in human destiny ... Christians saw that their rational God had made a universe of uniform laws on which men with their own rational minds ... could rely."  It is said that Western democracy follows along from Jewish roots of a written law to which rulers are subject, and Moses sharing the rule with capable subsidiaries.

1447  Catholic Church papacy returns to monarchical rule after Felix V abdicates.  Papacy enters a period of Italian concentration, ignoring Renaissance influences (p. 220 in Austin's Topical History of Christianity) and descends into authoritarianism and cultural solidarity (p. 216) while Europe blossoms in Renaissance.  Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

1450  cannon in regular use, make castles obsolete

1450  sailors know that marine compasses point slightly away from true north;  sailing due west according to a magnetic compass results in a change in latitude which is accurately measured

1453  Constantinople, the capital of eastern Catholics, falls to Muslim Turks.  Greek émigrés fleeing the city take up residence in Italy and make a living by teaching Greek to Italian pupils. They also bring with them many Greek texts that had been virtually unknown and unread in western Europe since the fall of Rome. Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), a priest who converts from the Greek to the Latin church and is a tireless promoter of ancient Greek studies, bequeaths thousands of Greek manuscripts to the people of his adopted home of Venice, where they form the nucleus of St. Mark's Library. The works of Plato are especially influential.

1476  Catholic practice of indulgences is advanced by Pope Sixtus IV, who promotes the buying of indulgences by the living for the dead who are in purgatory.  Catholic Church is encumbered with many pagan and corrupt practices, among them relics, the cult of saints, and pilgrimages, p. 207 in Austin's Topical History of Christianity.        Indulgences blow up in 1517.

1487  Dias discovers the southern tip of Africa and proves the Atlantic and Indian oceans are connected

1480 and thereabouts      https://artscolumbia.org/flashcards/renaissance-flashcards/the-renaissance-38-8319/

    Secrets of the Dead PBS Dec 19, 2017  Scholars fleeing Constantinople in 1453 after Muslims overrun it take ancient manuscripts to Italy and teach about the mysterious, lost civilizations of Greece and Rome, supplementing the surviving clues of architecture, statues, coins, and inscriptions.  The scholars are received in Italy.  Humanists apply the wisdom of the ancients to the Renaissance world.

    Lorenzo de’ Medici, “the Magnificent,” represents the Renaissance ideal of man, the person who has multiple talents in many fields..

    Humanism, an intellectual movement, is based on the study of classical culture.  It focuses on worldly subjects rather than on the religious issues.  Renaissance thinkers focus on the “human experience” and individual achievement.     There is also a spirit of adventure and curiosity.  Humanities are the subjects taught in ancient Greek and Roman schools, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and history.  Greek and Roman texts are used.     

    Renaissance artists portray religious figures such as Jesus and Mary, but use backgrounds of Greece and Rome.  (This explains the old paintings set in classical ruins, and with characters clothed in European garments.)  They also paint well known people of the day that have made individual achievements. They revive classical forms that had been done in ancient times such as when Donatello sculpted a life size soldier on horseback. Something like that hadn’t been done since ancient times. They represent humans and landscapes in realistic ways.

1480s  Portuguese navigators develop volta do mar, using the great wind wheel, the North Atlantic Gyre, to return from the Atlantic islands.  Sail far to the west — in the wrong direction — in order to catch usable following winds & return to Europe.  Columbus returns from America using the volta do mar, sailing north from Caribbean through Horse Latitudes to catch the prevailing mid-latitude westerlies.

1490 approx.  Da Vinci proposes several perpetual-motion machines but rejects them:  "How many vain chimeras have you created in the quest."

1492  Columbus discovers the New World.  There had been others before, but Columbus gets the attention.  On his first trip, he doesn't realize he didn't reach the region of his target, India, by a route that wasn't subject to Muslim caravan raids.

1499  Portuguese da Gama sails back from Calcutta, India with pepper, cinnamon, ginger

1491  Columbus plans his voyage westward and hopes to reach India by sea and avoid the Muslim land raiders who steal from trade caravans, each tribal leader taking a cut, one after another.

1492  Catholic Isabella and Ferdinand have superior armies and gunpowder-based arms, compared to King Boabdil's defenses in Granada, though Boabdil has the distinct geographical advantage in the fortress of Alhambra.  The Christians burn cropland and deprive the Islamic capital, Grandada, of supplies.  Boabdil (boo' ab deel'') capitulates (negotiated terms) instead of having his tens of thousands die of hunger and disease.  At the surrender, Boabdil personally confers the keys and leaves with his retinue on horseback for his negotiated refuge.  Within a year, he is pressured out and ends up in Morocco.  Jews and Muslims, those who refuse conversion to Catholicism, are also expelled.  Dr. Elizabeth Drayson depicts the Muslims with considerable sympathy in her 2017 book, The Moor's Last Stand.  In light of Spain's 2015 granting of Spanish citizenship to Jewish descendants of the expelled Jews (subject to many conditions), Dr. Drayson wonders if a similar offer will be made for Muslims.  She makes an extreme liberal statement on p. 181, about a brave new world of liberal humanist Islam.  The two adjectives, liberal and humanist, strip Islam of all religious meaning and float a cultural Islam on a bubbly raft of humanism.  

    This liberal ideal for modern Islam is at odds with Jihadist Islam.  An enlightened Islam is not the experience of Paris' Muslims in the no-go zones, outside the Peripherique ring road, of the Sharia-dominated banlieues, where assimilation is rejected.  See in this time line 2005 poor banlieues.   Page 8:  north-African Berber "Almohads ... religiously intolerant and anti-secular extremists" fight gathering Catholic armies.  For centuries, Catholics and Muslims had shared the Iberian Peninsula and traded across the border with mere raiding at the border and abundant diplomatic relations.  Though Italy is plagued by palace intrigues and killing (see 1513 in this time line), such is not as prevalent among the Spanish Catholics.  But deadly rivalry among the Muslim leaders in the Caliphate of Cordoba, and the subsequent, shrunken Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, weakens the Moors. This rivalry is a trait of Arabs and is promulgated by the Qur'an.  Search Internet for "blood feud  clan  honor."  In the 1990s, in Muslim Albania, there is lawlessness after the iron rule of communism ends.  It is the return of the blood feud.  https://gellerreport.com/2017/08/blood-feud-islamic.html/

1504  Columbus can't obtain supplies in Jamaica from Indians.  He consults Johannes Muller's Calendarium (1474) & finds a lunar-eclipse prediction, frightens the Indians into giving him supplies.

1506  Da Vinci explains earthshine, the dim illumination of the otherwise dark majority of the moon, other than the bright crescent, for two or three days either side of a new moon.  It is due to light reflecting to the moon from the earth.  When the moon is away from new by more than three days, the bright part of the moon is so bright that we don't notice the dim earthshine.

1509-1511  The School of Athens is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael, a part of Raphael’s commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.  The fresco represents all the greatest mathematicians, philosophers and scientists from classical antiquity gathered together sharing their ideas and learning from each other.

     In crowds and cities, common to carry a nosegay, something in one's hand to smell, to overcome stench of sewage, people, animals.

1510 approx.  18,000 relics of Catholics in Germany can be viewed by pilgrims for a fee that is also counted as an indulgence;  two million years of release from purgatory can be purchased.  Some relics:  a twig from Moses' burning bush, feathers dropped by angels, a tear from Jesus' weeping over Jerusalem.         Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

Moral trouble bf9000

1513 The Prince published by Machiavelli, who is called by Benjamin Wiker "one of the most profound teachers of evil" in his 2008 book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World.  Machiavelli's Italy is a "rat's nest of intrigue, corruption, and conflict" among Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, and the papal states.  He "witnessed the greatest hypocrisy in religion, including cardinals and popes who were nothing more than political wolves in shepherds' clothing."  Machiavelli himself is accused of treason and is tortured.      The wicked popes of the time are Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, and Alexander VI.  Sixtus makes six of his nephews cardinals.  He is implicated in the murder of two de Medicis.  (See 1476 in this timeline)  Innocent has children and shocks Italians by his nepotism.  He builds great buildings and ignores the need for reform.  Alexander has many children and provides for them with church revenue.  Two of his children are Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, the latter known personally by Machiavelli.  The Prince in Ch. 7 recounts how this same Cesare ruthlessly reigns in the rebellious district of Romagna through a henchman, Remirro, whom the Romagnis come to hate.  But Borgia has the henchman chopped in two one night at the piazza at Cesena, pleasing the Romagnis, but they are "numbed into obedience" (Wiker, p. 11) by the ingenious spectacle.  Machiavelli praises Borgia.  "Machiavelli convinces the reader that great evils...are praiseworthy if they are done in the service of some good."  Machiavelli warns that evil must be accomplished with a veneer of mercy, honesty, and religion.  "The Prince was a favorite of Lenin [a bloody Marxist] for whom the glories of communism justified any brutality."  See Stalin, Lenin's successor, at 1930 and following in this timeline.

    During Machiavelli's life, new kings in England (1485), France (1491), and Spain (1492) take on emperor-style roles and wrest much control of the Catholic Church from the popes. 

    To see Machiavelli's place in moral decline, see https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline

1514 Copernicus writes about the simpler calculations of a sun-centered (heliocentric) solar system, not to mention a straightforward plan of how planets orbit.  He uses sophisticated geometry to determine the planets' orbit radii (an advance over Ptolemy's model), in terms of the earth-sun distance, and the periods of the planets' revolutions.  He retains circles & compound epicycles;  the Greek rapture with the circle continues.  Compared to Ptolemaic, earth-centered model with epicycles and equant, accuracy of predictions is only slightly better & apparent variation in size of Moon is small, whereas with Ptolemy's model the Moon's predicted size varies almost 2 to 1.   http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node3.html  But, lacking the ellipses of Kepler in 95 yrs, accuracy of predicting planet positions is still off by up to five degrees, which is ten Moon diameters.

    Copernicus etc.  Man is understood to live on a tiny planet flung out into a space that has no center. It is a time of great confusion, fear, and disputes;  see Luther at 1517, Machiavelli at 1513, Peasants' War at 1525, Henry VIII at 1533, Luther's translation of the Greek Bible to High German at 1534.  Twenty years of turmoil and it doesn't end there.     Galileo in 1610 kicks off a new round.

Machiavelli, Luther, Copernicus, Calvin (1536 publishes Institutes of the Christian Religion), Galileo (to be born in 48 years), and Descartes (see 1637, 121 years after 1516) are examples of men who poke holes in orthodoxy but get away with it.  Many others attempt to start reforms but are squashed by authorities.  The printing press is a tool for these reformers to get their word out and find disciples.  In 2022, the writer, JE, finds it interesting that modern, orthodox, Protestant Christians (following Jesus) count most of this list of reformers as good.  (Machiavelli and Descartes are bad to varying degrees.)  That rebels turn out to be good means that some modern rebels will turn out to be good.  Martin Luther King was rebelling against authorities in 1955 but is commended by nearly everyone by 1977.  But many rebels are remembered for their evil:  Marx, Lenin, Mao, Freud, Rousseau, Sanger, Margaret Mead.  

1515 A.D.  https://lutheranreformation.org/theology/luthers-breakthrough-romans/

It’s not as though the church...had never read the Book of Romans and Paul’s ardent statements regarding justification by faith alone...the Church taught “infused grace,” the grace God puts in the sinner so that he might become righteous...obedience and behavior...gradual healing process...the sinner “starts to become” righteous as “God creates a new will in man so that he begins to fulfill the Law.”  (Luther:  "As a monk I led an irreproachable life. Nevertheless I felt that I was a sinner before God. My conscience was restless."  The merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’) Now I felt as though I had been reborn.  The believer had the full righteousness of Christ, who fulfilled the Law, already, now--not maybe or later--by faith.  "It is not our merit, but the mercy of God."  The book of Romans also helped Augustine, see 387 A.D. in this time line.

1516 Corsali makes known the Magellanic Clouds, mini-galaxies, to Europe after seeing them from southern hemisphere

1516 Luther in Germany declares the pope has no power to release souls from purgatory;  eve of the gates being thrown open to deal with centuries of ecclesiastical abuses and heresies p. 230 in Austin's Topical History of Christianity.  See 1170.

New Oxford Review Dec 2016 p. 9    Pope Francis says plenty of impromptu things that are exploited by liberal media, and he says things that seem to the writer, JE, to betray Christian orthodoxy, but sometimes he gets things right.  On June 26, 2016, on an airplane, he said, "Luther...was a reformer...in that time...the Church was not exactly a model to imitate.  There was corruption in the Church, there was worldliness, attachment to money, to power...today Lutherans and Catholics, Protestants, all of us agree on the doctrine of justification."  The editor of the NOR goes on to dispute the Pope's statement, but the Pope is correct about the Roman Catholic church of this time, 1516.  A point of the NOR editor is that Luther started a fracturing of Christianity into tens of thousands of denominations.  I dispute that.  There is Christian orthodoxy in the line of the reformed church of Calvin, there is the liberal "church" that is worldly modernism, there is Roman Catholicism  and like-minded Eastern versions that place tradition right up there with the Bible, there are cults like JW and LDS, and there are little offshoots by the thousands where charismatic leaders thought they had better ideas.

1517 Martin Luther posts 95 Theses;  others had the same ideas but had been ignored or persecuted.  Martin Luther and the Reformation by R.C. Sproul    Luther would stop short and say, “What does this mean, that there’s this righteousness that is by faith, and from faith to faith? What does it mean that the righteous shall live by faith?”...the lights came on for Luther. And he began to understand that what Paul was speaking of here was a righteousness that God in His grace was making available to those who would receive it passively, not those who would achieve it actively [by good works], but that would receive it by faith, and by which a person could be reconciled to a holy and righteous God.     Luthers's theses are translated into German, printed, and widely read across Germany;  popular furor erupts against church corruption.                     Samples from the 95:  The pope cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed.          This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept.       The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain.  See 1534

    https://intellection.wordpress.com/2006/11/14/aristotles-ethics-the-real-reason-for-luthers-reformation/  This web page claims that Luther was more about freeing up Catholics from the influence of Aristotle and his supporter Aquinas.  Luther’s greatest concern in his early reforming work was to rid the church of central Aristotelian assumptions...[but Luther's aim was not fulfilled] Thomistic solutions in some Protestant circles...continued use of Aristotle’s works by Protestant universities during and after the Reformation...modern proponents of an Aristotelian Christianity...Aristotle's crucial definitions in ethics and anthropology shaped the thinking of young theological students...Luther's scathing treatise of 1520, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation...chided educators for creating an environment “where little is taught of the Holy Scriptures and Christian faith, and where only the blind, heathen teacher Aristotle rules far more than Christ.”     See green text at https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline/radical-individualism-autonomy.

1520s  Probably smallpox, from European explorers, but before the Europeans reach the Incas, kills many Inca.  Subsequent epidemics strike every 10 years or so.  A web site says that native Americans view smallpox, not so much the conquistadors, as the turning point of history for native Americans.  Before Europeans, Americas population 8 to 30 million.  By 1650, about 90% decline.  By 1570, almost all Caribbean peoples vanish.

1521  Cortez conquers Aztecs, finds daily human sacrifice on a large scale among Aztecs

1521  Pope elections for Roman Catholics seem really strange when seen from the 21st century.  Example:  1521-1522 papal enclave.  Politics, gambling on the outcome, Henry VIII, Thomas Wolsey, Italians, leaks, "reduction of rations" for the bishops when they let it run too long.      Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

1522  One of Magellan's five ships makes it back to Spain;  the first circumnavigation.  Magellan died in battle in Philippines.

1522  Wittenburg city council, which is pro-Luther, authorizes removal of icons from churches.  The spoken word (sermons) is most important, church architecture changes so that all can see the pulpit.

      After disputing indulgences, Martin Luther gradually changes from pro-purgatory to anti-purgatory.  "The light of the Word had been put out by the wicked Popes" and they thrust upon men abominations. 

1525  centuries of peasant revolts over taxation, etc. culminate in the Peasants' War in Germany;  Luther tries to stem the revolt;  peasants massacre Weinsberg;  May 15  50,000 peasants killed by nobility;  Luther fears chaos

1532  Pizarro conquers Inca

1533  Henry VIII takes advantage of Protestant influence to defy the Pope and quietly marries Anne Boleyn when she suspects she is pregnant.  Anne is despised by English women.  The first wife, Katherine of Aragon, is the popular queen but is exiled by Henry to Kimbolton Castle for three years, dying at age 51.  Henry declares himself to be Supreme Head of the Church in England.

1533  European laypeople have no Bibles in their native languages since Bibles are hand-copied (or very recently printed on presses) in Latin, an archaic language.  The Roman Catholic priests, the keepers of Latin, filter what they tell people about the Bible, and there is no accountability for intentional errors (or we can charitably call it the grown-up "tradition" of the Catholic Church.)   

     1995 Mar 1   modernreformation.org  Alister McGrath Mar/Apr 1994 or March 1 1995   In the Middle Ages, even the Roman Catholic priests didn't know the simple truth of what is important in the Bible.  (Calvin will boil it down to "what you believe, and why.")  In 1995, McGrath says this confusion has arisen freshly in the West since 1960s, partly because of an overplay of feelings, such as unbridled "my personal experience of a god," which is often silly autonomy, being more important than a) experiencing God as He reveals himself in the Bible and b) being accountable (and gladly, at that) to the King of the universe.

     In the Middle Ages, Catholic priests were not educated very well (eventually, Calvin set up schools of theology for Protestants) and were ridiculed for being ignorant, and had low status in society for being exempt from taxes and military conscription.  (Very different from the respectability of modern clergy, except when there is abuse or corruption.)  Priests were pastors but not teachers nor evangelists, and often returned spite for spite to the laity.  The idea of universal Christianity (universal salvation) was everywhere.  In Geneva before the Reformation, the ratio of laypeople to clergy was 5000:200.  After the Reformation, with Calvinist (close to Presbyterian) clergy, the ratio became 5000:7, and most of the clergy were teaching and allowing laypeople to do work in the church, and laypeople through all of society were welcomed.

     A current in American Catholicism is for priests to be highly educated.  Graduate degrees are considered by Catholics to make priests more able.

1534  Luther translates the Greek Bible to High German for publication.  Germans find that the Bible has no Pope, indulgence, or purgatory.

Luther's writings, widely published, make Luther the first living, best-selling author    PBS 2017, Martin Luther:  The Idea that Changed the World     Lutherans look at Catholic priests and see that many of them are uneducated.  Lutherans establish Latin schools to produce an educated clergy.

1536  Farel and Viret debate Roman Catholics in Geneva.  With the addition of French John Calvin to the controversy, the city fathers eventually vote to reject Roman Catholicism and recover the gospel as it is taught from the pages of the Bible.  Geneva becomes the focus of Protestant Reformation.  The motto of Geneva becomes Post Tenebrus Lux, After Darkness, Light, reflecting the profound deliverance from darkness that the entire city feels as a result of the gospel’s progress in their lives.  http://www.genevanfoundation.com/articles/after-darkness-light-john-calvins-ministerial-call-to-geneva/             The light seen by Genevans can be contrasted to words of the Catholic mass for the dead, Dies Irae, sung in the Requiem Mass:  Day of wrath. Day that will dissolve the world into burning coals. What am I the wretch then to say?  What patron can I beseech?  When scarcely the just be secure. King of tremendous majesty, do not lose me on that day. My prayers are not worthy, but do thou, good God. Deal kindly lest I burn in eternal fire.

See in this timeline 2017 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

No particular time, just note it here:  Roman Catholics have ideas of salvation that are different from Protestants.  New Oxford Review Jan-Feb 2019 p. 21 "Our sins are forgiven in the confessional whether the man wearing the stole is a saint or a sinner.  What matters is our disposition."  The modern Protestant idea is that sins are forgiven by Jesus when a person recognizes Jesus' offer of forgiveness and receives His forgiveness.  Catholics believe general forgiveness can be granted by priests.

    Around 1500, Cajetan, a Catholic leader, thinks that a pure human nature is sufficient.  No transcendence is necessary.  Man can be autonomous.  (New Oxford Review Jan-Feb 2019 p. 25)  This type of thinking results in Modernity.  The NOR writer, James Schall, says that Pope Francis allows changes of doctrine so that Catholics can go along with modernity.  (Modernity in Wikipedia, an ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms following the Enlightenment.  See in this timeline 1899 Pope Leo XIII "modernism")          Cajetan isn't just a shallow liberal figure, he debates the Protestant reformers after he studies a lot.  He goes so far as to write Bible commentaries.  He departs in his writing from literal and traditional interpretations. 

1536  Henry VIII becomes a tyrannical monster following a jousting accident.  After the accident – just before he became estranged from the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn – the king, once sporty and generous, became cruel, vicious and paranoid, his subjects began talking about him in a new way, and the turnover of his wives speeded up. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-jousting-accident-that-turned-henry-viii-into-a-tyrant-1670421.html   The accident occurred at a tournament at Greenwich Palace when 44-year-old Henry, in full armour, was thrown from his horse, itself armoured, which then fell on top of him.  It aggravated serious leg problems which plagued him for the rest of his life, and may well have caused an undetected brain injury which profoundly affected his personality, according to the History Channel documentary Inside the Body of Henry VIII.   His weight attains 392 pounds because he does not cut back eating when forced to become sedentary.    Henry probably decides to divorce first wife Catherine in 1527.  Marries Anne Boleyn 1533.  He is excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1538.  Compare to 1517, Luther posts 95 theses.        If Henry had had access to wing suiting, free climbing, and motorcycle stunting, he would have done it all.

1537  The Roman Catholic Commission of Nine urges radical reform in Catholicism to overcome scandalous conditions.  Austin's Topical History of Christianity p. 293     Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

1539  Luther hears about Copernicus' thinking of a rotating earth & disdains it, as did almost everyone else (for lack of proof, there were seven competing models for the Solar System, see 1616)  Copernicus is misunderstood during three-way dogfight among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, the "defining feature of the age.".  Love, Kepler and the Universe p. 12. 

1540–1542  Coronado's expedition to find the Seven Cities of Gold has 300 soldiers, finds Indian pueblos, Zuni and Hopi.  Reaches future Barnalillo (City of Coronado), near Albuquerque.  See 1584.

1541  Michelangelo paints unclothed figures in the Sistine Chapel.  It is a scandal  but the Pope resists changing the paintings.  After Michelangelo's death, it is decided to obscure the private parts. ("Pictura in Cappella Ap.ca coopriantur"). Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, is commissioned to add perizomas (briefs), leaving unaltered the complex of bodies. When the work is restored in 1993, the conservators choose not to remove all the perizomas of Daniele, leaving some of them as a historical document.  Michelangelo is described as "inventor delle porcherie" ("inventor of obscenities", in the original Italian language referring to "pork things").  The "fig-leaf campaign" of the Counter-Reformation, aiming to cover all representations of private parts in paintings and sculptures, started with Michelangelo's works.  http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/m/Michelangelo.htm         Artists that followed Michelangelo's theme are Bernini (slipping drape) and Rodin.                 His art, while deeply admired, was considered by many to be, well, “dirty.”   While Michelangelo painted the chapel, Raphael was decorating the apartments down the hall, just waiting for him to slip up and be dismissed. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/michelangelos-dirty-poetr_b_83273.html

1541  Roman Catholic Contarini seeks reform through humanism, and works with Melanchthon toward joining Protestants with Catholics in agreeing on justification by faith.  Contarini is against the selling of church offices and roles.  But Luther and the Pope reject Contarini.  See 1555.

1543  exploding cannon shells with fuses in regular use;  term is "artillery projectile"

1545-1563  Council of Trent in northern Italy sets Roman Catholic practice that is mainly unchanged until 1962.  It attempts to deal with Protestants and reforms the Roman Church by removing numerous abuses and correcting repeated apostasy.    Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

    Issues:  original sin and cancellation of it by [1610 Galileoinfant] baptism, what justification is, the obligations of residence [as opposed to absenteeism] and frugality for bishops, the granting of the cup to the laity at Communion (the cup may be withheld, the priest drinks from it as proxy], suppression of concubinage among the clergy, veneration and invocation of the saints.  Relics and images of the saints are continued.  Some Protestants are invited to the council and attend but have no vote.  No concessions are made to Protestants.  The unwritten tradition of the Roman Church is affirmed as equally inspired with the Scriptures.   (Another source says Roman Catholic tradition stands above scripture.) Salvation cannot be assured in this life, apart from indulgences.  Good works are important.  Purgatory and transubstantiation are affirmed.  The seven sacraments are affirmed (Protestants observe only two).  Priests can pronounce forgiveness or retention of sins.  [Protestants say forgiveness comes from Jesus, the one who made the sacrifice, not from a person.]  The Apocrypha is part of the canon of the Bible, to back up purgatory, praying for dead, treasure of merit.  All in all, the medieval Catholic Church becomes entrenched for the next 400 years.  Aristotle returns to haunt Catholics, especially in Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

(JE in 2025:  indulgences are alive and well for Roman Catholics)  study.com   Plenary indulgence is granted for adoration of certain artifacts, going to certain places in Rome, praying on certain days, retreat for three days, reading Bible for thirty minutes.  Even possible to get an indulgence for a dead person, if that person was Catholic.  

1545  Cardano deals with roots of cubic equations and starts the study of complex numbers       i = (-1).5     i2 = -1

1550  Spanish fleet bringing gold, etc. to Seville numbers 17, grows rapidly

1500s  Fixed-pitch musical instruments in Europe are tuned to Ptolemy’s tetrachords, balancing between simple ratios that sound good (just intonation) & the strict math approach of a constant ratio between notes (Pythagorean algorithm).  Violins are first made in Italy, are not fixed-pitch, the musician may adjust tuning at will.

1555  Roman Catholic Gian Pietro Carafa seeks reform through force, using the Inquisition to stop heretics and defections to Protestantism.  Popes favor Carafa over Contarini (see 1541).  "Conviction not to reform doctrine but to reform lives...harden rather than soften the tenets of mainline Catholicism," Austin's Topical History of Christianity p. 294.  Carafa affirms extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the Church there is no salvation.

1555  Under the reign of Catholic Mary I in England, Bloody Mary, who married Philip of Spain, Catholicism makes a comeback for a time.   Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, are executed.     Later kings and queens are Protestant.  1605 the Gunpowder Plot is a low point for Catholics in England;  Guy Fawkes and his Catholic friends try to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

1560  Tycho at age 14 sees a solar eclipse.  His interest in astronomy starts.

1563  Tycho finds Alfonsine planetary tables off by a month (conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn)

1565  Spanish found St. Augustine, Florida; oldest permanently occupied European settlement in U.S.

1572  Tycho & others see a new star (even in daytime; a supernovae) and wonder if the honored idea of an unchanging starry sphere is wrong.  A major breakthrough in European thinking.  Tycho famous, offers for positions come from all over Europe.  See 1604.

1577  Tycho shows that comets are outside the Earth's atmosphere, introduces doubt as to the unchangeability of Aristotle's spheres beyond Moon, a major shakeup.  He says the comet penetrates the crystalline spheres, therefore there are no spheres.

1585  first commercial importation of chocolate into Europe;  Veracruz Mexico to Seville

1580  Uraniborg, Tycho's observatory, is operational.  It is a tourist site today.  See 1585.   Tycho knows of the near-the-horizon refraction of light and applies a correction to his records.

1580 approx.  Anabaptists in Europe and Separatists in England say the "gathered" church is those freely and consciously Christian, not simply all the population of an area  p. 281 Austin's Topical History of Christianity

1584  Harriot in London is able to converse in Algonkin with two Native Americans, Manteo & Wanchese, who were taken by Raleigh to London & housed at Durham House.  "Many things they sawe with us...as mathematical instruments, sea compasses...spring clocks that seemed to goe of themselves...they thought they were rather the works of gods than men."  These Indians caused a sensation in London but were shielded by Raleigh from exploitation.  They performed a commercial function, luring wealthy Britons to invest in Raleigh's schemes.  Manteo was willing but Wanchese was suspicious.  Both were returned to their tribe.

1584  Da Vinci's techniques using shading, texture, and viewpoint projection go beyond his contemporaries

1585 Tycho's observatory, employees, & publications cost Denmark 5% of GNP.  Tycho probably never saw a telescope, did his measurements with his eyes & precision instruments.  His accuracy reaches 2 minutes of arc, just 1/30 of a degree.  New king Christian IV can't bear the cost in 1597, cuts back funding, and Tycho leaves, ends up in Prague, where he lives another four years.

1585  Simon Stevin of Bruges, in his book De thiende ("The Tenth"), promotes decimal fractions for common people.  See 1619.

1586  Simon Stevin carries out Galileo's thought experiment, showing that the speed of falling objects is not faster for heavier objects, contradicting Aristotle

1588  Cataldi finds a six-digit prime number, 219-1 = 524287.  This is a Mersenne prime.

1592 Pope Clement VIII approves coffee after being delighted with it.  It had previously been rejected in Europe as being a drink of Muslims.  See 1667 coffee houses in Paris.

1593  Viete finds pi to 11 digits

1596  flush toilet is invented and built for Queen Elizabeth I by her Godson, Sir John Harrington

1597  Galileo in Padua writes to Kepler:  "Many years ago I became a convert to the opinions of Copernicus...I have written many reasons...which up to now I have preferred not to publish, intimidated by the fortune of our teacher Copernicus who, though he will be of immortal fame to some, is yet by an infinite number laughed at and rejected."  See 1616.  Philip and Phylis Morrison write in Powers of Ten, "The prize to be won by setting the earth free among the celestial wanderers was nothing less than the unity of the entire cosmos."       When Kepler teaches, he finds that new ideas are constantly popping into his head, and he often expresses these ideas out loud, confusing his students.

1598  Juan de Onate expedition quells a revolt of Pueblo indians in the future New Mexico, killing, enslaving, and cutting off feet.  Pueblo people must supply settlers with labor, corn, and textiles, in fertile times and during drought, despite being excluded from the most fertile and watered land.  Native religion is suppressed, to the outrage of the Pueblo people.  See 1680 for the Pueblo Revolt.

1600 approx.  Galileo proposes inertia, which leads eventually to wide acceptance of sun-centered solar system & rotating earth

1600  Kepler at age 29 writes about Tycho, one year before Tycho's death, commending his accomplishments.  Kepler says, "he was hindered by the diversity of the phenomena as well as by the fact that the truth lies hidden exceedingly deep."  Kepler is able to divine the truth that eluded Tycho.

1600  William Gilbert publishes in London "De Magnete" ("on the magnet"). His explanation of the compass: the Earth is a giant magnet.  http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/whchron2.html

1600 19 February    Wikipedia     Huaynaputina volcano, the largest eruption ever recorded in S. America killed at least 1,000 buried the surrounding area with 7 ft of volcanic rock     impact on Earth's climate: temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere decreased; cold waves hit parts of Europe, Asia and the Americas; and the climate disruption may have played a role in the onset of the Little Ice Age, see 1670 in this time line        7 cubic miles of erupted material    Larger than 1883 Krakatau, or Pinatubo

1600  https://probe.org/the-enlightenment-and-belief-in-god/  Francis Bacon (1561-1627). Bacon, an English philosopher and statesman, abandons the classical deductive way of understanding nature handed down from Aristotle, championing instead an experimental, inductive approach. He rejects the authority of tradition and provides “a method of experiment and induction that seemed to offer an infallible means of distinguishing truth and error.”  Bacon's approach is controversial, most did not jump on his bandwagon.

1600  serfdom in Russia enslaves millions to estates;  many peasants kill themselves to escape hardship, others join revolts.  45 million serfs at the peak, ten times the number of U.S. slaves.

1600  In music, Renaissance period is followed by Baroque, until the Classical era starts in 1750.  Baroque music includes the complexity of counterpoint & contrast.  Church music brings out intermingling of solo, chorus, orchestra.  Corelli, Vivaldi, Handel, Bach.  Instruments unavailable to Baroque composers are piano & clarinet, the clarinet with its many keys being far more versatile & playing a wider frequency range than trumpet, consider clarinet music by Goodman (King of Swing) & Gershwin (1924,  clarinet glissando in Rhapsody in Blue).  (Clarinet development has major milestones in 1740 & 1839, piano in 1700 & 1846.)  Seen from later (Classical era), Baroque is criticized as being coarse & old fashioned but it is interesting music to moderns.

1601  Queen Elizabeth declares, "Know you not that I am Richard II" in Shakespeare's Richard II.  Shakespeare's company is fined for the dangerous dialogue.  This involves Catholics vs. protestants, a dominating cultural war of the time.  New Oxford Review Ap 2020 page 37  Disagreements over images, Purgatory, cooperative grace, works of righteousness.

1603  Kepler publishes the first modern book on optics and focusing

1604  first purely English alphabetical dictionary is A Table Alphabeticall by Robert Cawdrey

1604  Kepler finds a new star, too (see 1572, 1987)

1605  Kepler finds Mar's orbit to be a good fit to an ellipse (First Keplerian Law) with eccentricity 1/11, a perceptible ellipse rather than a circle, and tilt of 2 degrees from earth's orbital plane.  Proposes the Second Keplerian Law:  the radius vector of a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time intervals.  Kepler works from Tycho's observations of Mars.  He dispenses with 1500 years of circles & epicycles.  He finds that the sun is offset 1/59 of the orbital radius of the earth.

1608  Kepler writes an early science-fiction novel, Somnium.  It tells of a trip to the Moon.  Kepler explains that, once on the Moon, a person would not be aware that the Moon is moving, any more than a person on Earth is aware of motion.

1609  Fabricius discovers the first known periodic variable star to be Mira.  This is yet another disproof of the ancient notion that the stars are unchanging.  See 350 B.C.

1609  Kepler publishes Astronomia Nova.  A physical force from the Sun, weakening with distance, moves the planets.  Kepler does not have all the ideas that Newton will have in about 1687.  This book moves beyond geometry to physics.  The book has Kepler's ellipses.  "The Earth [has] a force that retains the Moon, like a sort of chain."  Even the Moon has a power of attraction for the Earth.  Kepler writes that the Prutenic Tables' error for Mars' location is 5 degrees, but with his ellispses "the error is entirely suppressed."    Kepler's book also expresses the inverse-square law of the weakening of light with distance from a point source.

1610  Galileo the first to use telescope to make astronomical discoveries, finds that the division between below-Moon and beyond-Moon is invalid.  Moon has mountains like Earth.  Phases of Venus.  Many more stars seen with telescope, unlimited number of stars as apertures increase.  Soon:  distances to stars vary.

1610  Galileo observes four moons of Jupiter that are clearly not orbiting the earth.  The earth-center dogma is proven wrong.  Galileo publishes findings that support Copernicus in the face of opposition from Aristotelians at the universities, on the basis that creation is perfect.  Galileo's arch-enemy is Christoph Scheiner. 

1610  The greatest imperfection that Galileo notes is sunspots, & he finds that sunspots change their shapes as seen over three days or so, that they are seen to originate and perish, and that therefore the Sun is not perfect.  The Maunder Minimum  soon removes sunspots from the debate for several decades (see 1670).

    The perfect creation is also violated when better telescopes show craters on the Moon and intersecting craters (indicating an earlier impact and a later impact).

1610  Galileo publishes Sidereus Nuncius, Starry Messenger.  It is a sensation.  But many people deny his findings and refuse to even look through a telescope.  "With the stubbornness of vipers, never wanted to see...I offered a thousand times...This sort of person thinks that philosophy is a book like the Aeneid or Odyssey, and that one has not to search for truth in the world of nature, but in the comparisons of texts."  See Wikipedia, scholasticism 1100 to 1700 A.D.  The book is snatched up.  The British ambassador to Venice dispatches one to King James I. 

1611  King James version of Bible

1614  Napier in Scotland discovers the use of logarithms to make multiplication faster, spends 20 yrs calculating tables.  His initial tables are rapidly published and used soon by Kepler, see 1618.  The leading uses of logarithms are astronomy and geodesy.  Log tables for trigonometry are important.  Two motivations for using logs are to speed calculations and to reduce errors.

1616  Tim O'Neill     https://www.quora.com/Why-was-the-Catholic-Church-so-opposed-to-heliocentrism-for-example-in-the-Renaissance         O'Neill debunks the modern  idea that the geocentric model of the heavens was religion vs. science.  O'Neill says the Catholic Church was in line with the cosmology of the age when it opposed the sun at the center.  The popular modern idea, that the Church said the Earth is the center because that is where God put man, is a misunderstanding by moderns.

In 1616, these models competed, and Copernicus' model was near last in believability.  (List from Michael Flynn.  Reference:  The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown by Flynn.)

•     Heraclidean. Geo-heliocentric. Mercury and Venus circle the Sun; everything else circles the Earth.

•     Ptolemaic. Geocentric, stationary Earth.  Cannot establish even the relative distances between planets.

•     Copernican. Heliocentric, pure circles with lots of epicycles, what moderns call unnecessarily complex.

•     Gilbertian. Geocentric, rotating Earth.

•     Tychonic. Geo-heliocentric. Sun and Moon circle the Earth; everything else circles the Sun.

•     Ursine. Tychonic, with rotating Earth.  Tycho and Ursus hate each other.

•     Keplerian. Heliocentric, with elliptical orbits.

    Heliocentrism, which was against Aristotle's physics, "raised far more questions than it answered. If the earth wasn't the centre of the cosmos, why did matter fall downward? Why did fire rise up? If the earth is rotating, why isn't there a constant headwind?  [It was not known that air pressure is less at high altitude, and that space is vacuum.]  And if it was revolving around the sun, why can't we see the stars shift slightly over the course of a year [due to parallax]?"  See two paragraphs down for answers.

    O-Neill, an atheist, continues on his web page.  "The Catholic Church then as now did not consider the Bible to be literally true - that is a very modern and largely Protestant idea. Catholics used four levels of exegesis - the literal, the allegorical/symbolic, the moral and the eschatological."  "The Church could accommodate scientific ideas that were contrary to the face-value, literal reading of a passage of scripture."      Through this time line, note many occasions of the hierarchical Catholic Church causing problems.  Protestant, non-hierarchical churches often run off the rails, but orthodox Christians are free to seek protestant churches that continue in reformed theology.

    Galileo ignored Kepler, a Lutheran, and went with Copernicus but both were "refuted and rejected by other scholars at the time," not just the Church.  Copernicus' De Revolutionibus was used for it's predictions of planet positions but was ignored by scientists and almost everyone where it talked about cosmology.  By 1803, scientists finally had enough answers to the longstanding questions that had been supporting geocentrism, see two paragraphs above.

1618 Kepler proposes the Third Keplerian Law:  squares of planetary orbital periods are proportional to cubes of mean distances to sun.  Such tidy integers, like squares & cubes, will be seen to come from calculus (1666), which ties together differentiation (slopes of functions) with areas.  Kepler makes use of Napier's logarithms.

  Example:  ∫ x3 dx = 3x2     the 3 out in front is a constant, doesn't depend on x.  The square on the right is also a constant, merely the cube on the left minus one, not dependent on x and not minus some fraction or to some esoteric power.

1619  Scottish John Napier promotes the modern decimal point, to make decimal fractions like 3.14159.  See 1585.

1620 Galileo does experiments rather than studying the ancient scholars (Aristotle) & is  the chief founder of modern science

1620 Pilgrims land at Plymouth Harbor

1623 or 1621  Pilgrim harvest meal;   Wampanoag autumn stew, not turkey-dressing-cranberries-pumpkin pie.  Thanksgiving as a national observance dates from Pres. Lincoln and Pres. Franklin Roosevelt.

1624 Briggs in England publishes 14-digit logarithm tables for 1-20,000 & 90,000 to 100,000

1624  British Herbert of Cherbury studies in France and publishes De Veritate.  Reason reigns, he is rigidly opposed to the supernatural.  His "five articles" are useful to British Deists to come.  See 1690s.

1627 Kepler issues new planetary tables that give accurate forecasts, the Rudolfine Tables.  Kepler's laws work even for Jupiter's moons.  Gravity, the reason for orbits, is a mystery until Newton, but Kepler has a feeling that the Sun is exerting some influence.  (Love p. 11 Kepler and the Universe.  On p. 64, a force that pulls planets around.)  It is known that each planetary retrograde motion, as seen from Earth, is when the planet is opposite the Sun.      The idea of "force field" will be in the future.  After Newton popularizes the idea of a gravitational field in about 1687, Maxwell in 1864 comes up with electric and magnetic fields.  In 1915, Einstein will reveal space-time, a field theory.  In the 1920s, Dirac will reveal quantum electrodynamics.

1628 Harvey determines how blood circulates in the body.  Before, blood was thought to go one-way, from heart to periphery, without returning.  This was not unreasonable, blood flows out from cut arteries and veins.

1628 Vlacq in Holland publishes 10-place log table covering the 70,000 that Briggs skipped.  One of Vlacq's tables has two million entries;  603 entries are found to be erroneous.  1633 publishes log trig tables.  See 1794.

https://probe.org/the-enlightenment-and-belief-in-god/   Prior to the Enlightenment, believing in God in the West was like believing in the sunrise.  From an orthodox (traditional doctrine) Christian standpoint, recognizing the far-flung influences of the Enlightenment aids a person in understanding western history.

Austin's Topical History of Christianity p. 327  Enlightenment is positive toward Christianity: 

• against superstition, ending witchcraft craze

• democracy over totalitarianism

• against slavery

• a generally pro-moral attitude

JE comment:  scientific and medical advances open the way to understand God's creation (a wonderful harmony of astronomy, physics, and chemistry) and how people think

Enlightenment threatens Christianity:

debunks scripture, miracles, salvation, prayer, deity of Jesus, trinity, a God interested in his creation

JE comment:  sets a stage receptive to Darwin's (and others) evolution ideas, see 1794

The Day is Now Far Spent Roman Catholic Cardinal Robert Sarah a Black African from sub-Sahara Guinea in conversation with French Nicolas Diat Ignatius Press 2019 page229   Enlightenment ideology affirms that reason must cut itself off from all divine light.  Modern civilization, if it can be called that, is a chaos of desires.  But look at Africa;  suicide there is almost nonexistent.  Individuals there are integrated in small communities.  Solzhenitsyn at Harvard declared that the tilt toward evil is from a humanistic concept that there is no evil inherent in human nature.  It is the rejection of original sin.  "You have the impression that democracies can last.  But you know nothing about it."  page 234  "Young people are easy prey."  [In the 2020 riots of BLM and Antifa, young white women outnumber blacks.]  

Three influences came to the rescue of the supernatural aspects of Christianity:  Pietism aiding Lutherans, Methodists arising in England and spreading to America, revivalism.

Enlightenment references in this time line

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/hegel-and-germany-after-french-revolution:  optimistic utopia of the Enlightenment, people are basically perfect

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/solzhenitsyn-addresses-harvard:  man seen as the center of all

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline, see 1637 Descartes, 1675 Pietism, 1713 Collins, 1746 Princeton Univ...First Great Awakening which challenges humanism, mid-1700s  The Scientific Revolution, 1768 Reimarus, 1770 Thomas Jefferson rejects orthodox Christianity, 1780  Voltaire, 1784 Immanuel Kant, 1795 Second Great Awakening, Enlightenment gave new ways of thinking about values, government, and morals, 1901 Wrede, 1918...utopian-socialist ravages, 1973 Jacob Bronowski & Francis Schaeffer, 1980  Sociologist Robert Nisbet

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/whittaker-chambers:  the "Enlightenment’s confidence...merged in the 19th century with a progressive understanding of history...the power of the state"

1637 Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, is in full flower in math and philosophy.  Graphing y vs. x on Cartesian coordinates, and analytic geometry, are from Descartes.  (La géométrie)  This is during the Enlightenment (the Age of Reason) when skepticism reigns, though Descartes is Roman Catholic.  See more of Enlightenment in this timeline at  mid-1700s  The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

    In philosophy, Descarte breaks with scholasticism, the theology and philosophy taught in medieval Europe, based on Aristotelian logic and the writings of the early Church Fathers and having a strong emphasis on tradition and dogma.  One of his works is Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences.

    Descartes, a Rationalist, claims that the ultimate starting point for all knowledge is not the senses but reason.  In its purest form, Rationalism holds that all rational beliefs and knowledge consist in first principles and innate concepts (concepts that we are just born having) that are somehow generated and certified by reason, along with anything logically deducible from these first principles.  Examples:  space, time, cause and effect.  Descartes holds that mind and matter are entirely separate but are connected through God.

    Descartes starts with skeptical doubt.  The external senses can all be called into doubt.  "Cogito, ergo sum," Latin for "I am thinking, therefore I exist," is Descartes' most famous principle, and he considers that this is a sure fact.  He tries to find enough other first principles utterly immune to rational doubt that can provide a rational basis for all other beliefs.

    Modern philosophers do not believe that Descartes succeeded, but he was influential.  Kant (see 1788 in this timeline)  will seek to hold onto values of Enlightenment thinking, chiefly that human beings know things primarily through reason. Other philosophers, particularly Hume and Reid, will reject the foundation of Descartes' argument, in favor of the view that certain empirical assumptions are necessary for knowledge.

    (This material from http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/philosophical-battles-empiricism-versus-rationalis.html and http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=12&article=2790)

    "If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things."       Moral trouble bf9000

    Discours de la Méthode. 1637.

    Descartes seeks to prove the existence of God through the idea of God in the mind of a thinking being. He accepts St. Anselm's ontological proof of God.  He believes the reality of the physical world through the conclusion that God would not try to fool thinkers with illusions.

    The alternative to Rationalism is Empiricism.  They claim that sense experience is the ultimate starting point for all our knowledge.  In its purest form, empiricism holds that sense experience alone gives birth to all our beliefs and all our knowledge.  Classic example:  John Locke (1632–1704).

    "Descartes began the great game of epistemology, which in Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant waxed into a Three Hundred Years’ War that at once stimulated and devastated modern philosophy.”  New Oxford Review July-Aug 2015 p. 8  "Descartes began the grand human experiment of the exercise of reason without God, a counterpart to humanity's experiment to be morally good and just without God."  P. 9 "downward spiral into relativism that postmodern philosophy has wrought."

    Descartes likes da Vinci and Galileo.

    His philosophical starting-point is dangerous to faith. He trusts in reason to the exclusion of revelation.  This contrasts with Paul’s prescription: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20).  Maritain says that pride ultimately led Descartes to his radical doubt.  This is a stark contrast to Christ’s portrait of those who are pleasing to Him: “Whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:15).

    To see Descartes' place in moral decline, see 1513 Machiavelli and https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline

     https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/01/11/nowhere-to-go-but-up-a-review-of-the-end-of-quantum-reality/

    Pope St. John Paul II in his famous work, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, traced the breakdown between public Christianity and Western Civilization back to one man, the ivory tower intellectual René Descartes (1596-1650):

    [T]he father of modern rationalism…created the climate in which in the modern era such an estrangement became possible…about 150 years after Descartes all that was fundamentally Christian in the tradition of European thought had already been pushed aside. This was the time of the Enlightenment…

    Or as the late pontiff put it elsewhere in the same book: “Descartes marks the beginning of the development of the exact and natural sciences as well as of the humanistic sciences in their new expression. He turns his back on metaphysics and concentrates on the philosophy of knowledge”

    See the modern movie, Vertical Causation.         See in this time line  1787  Alexander Tytler

    Descartes in 1633 is about to publish Le Monde, a pro-Copernicus book, but pulls back in light of the Catholic persecution of Galileo.

1639  Greaves of Oxford Univ. publishes Pyramidographia after measuring the Great Pyramid of Cheops, inside & out

1644  Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, "the law is king" is a step in replacing rex lex, "the king is law;"  Rule of Law;  individual rights

1644  Particular Baptists in London have a Calvinist leaning and are the ancestors of orthodox, Calvinist Baptists in the U.S.  Differences from Roman Catholics, especially after the Council of Trent in 1545-1563 (see this time line) are striking.  Though there are important points in common:  trinitarian repentance, faith, a judgment is coming.  1) Sola scriptura vs. Bible + councils (especially Trent, 1870 Vatican I [papal infallibility], Vatican II [see 1962 in this time line] ) + pope.  2) Mediator is Jesus, but for Catholics add Mary (the Hail Mary prayer, Latin Ave Maria) and saints.  3) Grace     Baptists, grace received by faith, imputed grace, all at once.  Catholics, infused grace, measured doses, aided by confessions and prayers;  sacramentalism (7 of them, baptism washes away original sin, Mass is a re-sacrifice of Jesus);  ex opere operator which is hard to understand but one can find on Internet how a Catholic layperson didn't receive a grace because it was administered incorrectly.  4) Assurance   Romans 8:1, vs. lack of assurance (venial and mortal sin, purgatory).

http://biology-pages.info/P/Photosynthesis_history.html

1648  Dutch van Helmont, first experiment to explore the nature of photosynthesis. Some years earlier, van Helmont had placed in a large pot exactly 200 pounds of soil that had been thoroughly dried in an oven. Then he moistened the soil with rain water and planted a 5-pound willow shoot in it. He then placed the pot in the ground and covered its rim with a perforated iron plate. The perforations allowed water and air to reach the soil but lessened the chance that dirt or other debris would be blown into the pot from the outside.  For five years, van Helmont kept his plant watered with rain water or distilled water. At the end of that time, he carefully removed the young tree and found that it had gained 164 pounds. (This figure did not include the leaves that had been shed.) He then redried the soil and found that it weighed only 2 ounces less that the original 200 pounds. Van Helmont theorized that the increase in weight of the willow arose from the water alone. He did not consider the possibility that gases in the air might be involved.     It turned out the photosynthesis takes carbon out of atmospheric carbon dioxide and make the carbon available to build organic molecules.  Modern gardeners don't need to add carbon (leaves, etc.) to the soil to provide carbon, such carbon is not absorbed by roots.

1649  Descartes asserts that the brain operates by a fluid, distinguishes brain from the immaterial "mind."

1650  world population 500 million, in North America half a million   0 A.D. 200 million, 1000 A.D. 400 million, 1810 1 billion, 1900 1.6 billion, 1930 2 billion, 1990 5 billion, 2000 6 billion

1650  Pascal and Fermat develop statistics for card and dice games

1651  Englishman (one of the first modern atheists) Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan, in which there is a sideline connected to modern liberal "rights."  "Every man has a right to every thing;  even to one another's body."  As reviewed in Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World 2008, Hobbes made up this business about rights.  It has no basis in the law of 1651, but it has come to have a wide following in the modern world.  Wiker says the free-speech movement has a basis in Hobbes;  Hobbes would agree that there is a right in 1987 for Andres Serrano "to shock Christians and delight the artsy intelligentsia of New York [Stux Gallery] by dropping a crucifix in urine" for display in a traveling art show in 1989.  Wiker says Hobbes is behind modern liberal politics.  "Morality becomes a private thing...no one has a right to tell me what to do."  "Hobbes' notion of rights...a rights-demanding, passion-driven collection of self-willed individuals hell-bent on getting whatever they desire."

    New Oxford Review Jan-Feb 2019 p. 40 quotes:  mediums of Hobbesianism are social justice warriors.  They are storm troopers who police a world in which there is no standard of thought beyond the swift fist.  Antifa.  The Rene Descartes Fan Club.  The U.S. has become a victim culture umpired by the state.  If you are a victim, the state is your ally.  In a world without truth, this is what we have become.  Springtime for Snowflakes by Michael Rectenwald.

See 1670, Spinoza.

1656  Huygens publishes conservation of momentum

1664  Willis writes that the cerebral hemispheres (70% of human brain) determine thought and action & are separate from motor functions

1665  peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals begin with Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London

1665  Last in a long series of plague epidemics that began in London in 1499. The Great Plague kills 17%. Burials at parish churches or communal plague pits such as Finsbury Field in Cripplegate and the open fields in Southwark.  Well-off residents flee to the countryside.  Edicts prohibit churches from keeping dead bodies on their premises during public assemblies or services, and carriers of the dead have to identify themselves and not mix with the public.  "The bell always going...either for deaths or burials.”  Plague’s causes attributed by some to filth and squalor, inadequate disposal of sewage, and poor nutrition among London’s impoverished residents.  Spread by fleas is not known.  The Great Plague dies out during the Great Fire and never returns--central parts of London are rebuilt with wider streets to relieve crowding and better sewage systems.  London’s Privy Council issues new Plague Orders banning burial of future plague victims in parish churches and small churchyards, enforces use of quicklime at burial sites.       See 1858 The Great Stink in London

1666  Newton flees plague at Cambridge and develops calculus at Lincolnshire.  Newton had studied Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, see notes in this timeline since 1514.  Newton showed definite signs of Asperger's Syndrome, but it didn't keep him from brilliant insights.  Einstein & other famous people had Asperger symptoms.  Asperger is on the autism spectrum.

1667  Paris is first city to have nighttime street lights, using candles.  Previously, nighttime in public was for criminals, prostitutes and drunks, but with street lights, coffee houses stay open late.

1668  Italian Redi's experiment with gauze-covered jar with meat inside, which doesn't produce maggots, is evidence against spontaneous generation of life from non-living matter, but spontaneous generation retains adherents until Pasteur in 1864

1669  Hennig Brand stumbles upon white phosphorous made from 60 pails of urine as he searches for the philosopher's stone.  This alchemy quest eventually leads to chemistry, metallurgy, and pharmacology.    Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are essential plant nutrients and are listed in that order as percentages on fertilizer bags.  Water-soluble phosphorous for plants is phosphoric acid.     Hennig Brand's use of urine was found to be the hard way;  the easy way is to mine calcium-phosphate rock in Florida and Utah.  Phosphoric acid in colas gives sharpness and retards mold and bacteria but is less acidic than the citric acid in orange juice. 

1669  Bartholinus at Univ of Copenhagen observes light polarization in calcite.  1672 Huygens proposes differences in speed of light as reason for refraction.

    Between Copernicus & Newton, each knowledgeable person was deciding why we don't fly off the earth as it spins, at the rate of about 1000 miles per hour (at the equator).  This was hotly debated.  Everyone knew that when you swing a heavy object around yourself with a string & then let go, it flies off.  After Newton, people knew that gravity keeps us on the earth. 

    Smart people ask this further question:  how fast would the earth have to rotate to make us fly off?  Answer:  17.2 times as fast.  Yes, that would make us slowly float off, & it would be as fast as a satellite orbits, just skimming the earth, if it weren't for atmospheric drag.  A corollary is that one's mass, as measured with a spring scale, is 1/17.2 = 6% less at the equator than at a pole.     But https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AwrSbnNp6NNXp.gAAOZXNyoA_ylu=X3oDMTEyazRuY2o3BGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwM0BHZ0aWQDQjI1NDNfMQRzZWMDc3I-?qid=20080414182604AAAwLWj&p=spring%20balance%20inaccurate%20equator%20pole says it is .3% difference, not 6%, so I am not sure about 6%.

    A thought experiment:  if the earth were rotating 8.6 times as fast, at the equator you would weigh half as much.  At 16.5 times as fast, a 150 pound person would weigh 6 pounds on a spring scale.  As the rotation rate increases, there is less air pressure as the atmosphere is being partially slung outward into space (but more so at the equator, not at all at the poles).  You would lose consciousness due to lack of air at about 11 times the rotation rate.  At 17.3 times, air & everything else, including the ground, would gradually lift off, and there would be titanic volcanic eruptions all around the equator as the gas in magma boils out.  (Think about Mt. St. Helens, the magma gas blew out as the landslide took away the overlying pressure.)  All water bodies near the equator would boil due to the vanishing atmospheric pressure.  As atmospheric pressure becomes zero, the air chills toward absolute zero.  With all these strange things happening at once, we know that you wouldn't be conscious to witness it unless you were in a pressure suit.

    Between 1610 & early 1700s, & certainly by 1802 (Wollaston) & 1807 (energy recognized in the literature), people are aware that all the solar system is the same material as earth & operates by the same physics.  This is a great revolution in how people think of the cosmos.

1669  Blaise Pascal Pensées  Defense of the Christian Religion   Will Durant hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French prose".  Infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity – seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace.  Pascal is a child prodigy.  Concepts of pressure and vacuum;  defense of the scientific method.  One of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.  Projective geometry at age 16, with Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.  Advocates for Jansenism, a form of Catholic Calvinism, against Jesuits.  http://thegreatestbooks.org/nonfiction  list is generated from 107 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources.

1670  Following after Hobbes (1651), Spinoza (a Jew rejected by his synagogue) writes Theological-Political Treatise, critiques of Judaism.  Enlightenment influence.  Blind faith is not enough.  The start of Higher Criticism.  The Bible is a compiled text of many different authors.  He doubts the traditional claim of Judaism that the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) was composed entirely by Moses.  He also rejects the claim that the Jews had been chosen by God.

Both Hobbes and Spinoza are cited by Nathan Deisem   https://nathandeisem.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/the-documentary-hypothesis-a-critical-analysis-of-its-arguments-and-presupositions/?msclkid=e848b12cae6411ec8f60c742157733eb as the start of the Documentary Hypothesis, which turns into a campaign by skeptics to discredit the Bible and remove the supernatural from Christianity and Judaism.  Phrases:  anti-supernatural presuppositions predetermine thinking, predictive prophecy cannot happen, presuppositional negation.  In 1805, Willhem de Wette advances the Documentary Hypothesis.  See 1805.

      Without the anti-supernatural foundation and skeptical thought of the Enlightenment, it is unlikely that biblical criticism would have lasted.

1670  Maunder Minimum of sunspots for 70 years;  Little Ice Age in Europe in full swing

1673  English John Milton recalls Plato's ancient idea of "eye beams," see 410 B.C. in this time line.  "When I consider how my light is spent..."

1675  van Leeuwenhoek sees bacteria, protozoans and human cells in his microscopes

1675     Rømer and Huygens find speed of light by moons of Jupiter 220000 meters per second.  The next advance is 1729.  (This chain of dates is from Wikipedia.)

1675  Pietism counters the Enlightenment's opposition of scriptures, miracles, prayer, deity of Jesus, and interest of God in his creation.  Pietism, through Spener, Francke, and Count von Zinzendorf, rescue Lutherans from cold formalism.  Pietists emphasize the new birth and personal faith.  See 1727, modern missionary movement       1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

late 1600s  Tycho's solar-system model of earth center, Sun around earth, other planets circle the Sun is still credible in some circles

1676  Romer of Denmark, working at Paris, finds speed of light when Jupiter's moon Io has eclipses that vary by tens of minutes.  He compares the eclipses when the Earth and Jupiter are nearest, vs. when Jupiter is on the other side of the sun.

1670s  Suffering of Pueblo natives in New Mexico is from drought and Apache raids that the Spanish can't stop.  Culminates in Pueblo Revolt in 1680.

1679  Leibniz invents binary number system.  It is useful in logical thinking, for prime numbers (see 1588), and in electronic logic circuits including microprocessors.  A Mersenne prime is one less than a power of 2.

1679  on the topic of abortion, Pope Innocent XI condemns 65 propositions, including #35: It seems probable that the fetus (as long as it is in the uterus) lacks a rational soul and begins to first have one when it is born and consequently it must be said that no abortion is homicide.   Since Aristotle, a widespread view had been that a human from conception has successive souls, vegetative, animal, and rational.  This is "delayed hominization."  Aristotle held that abortion of pre-rational fetuses was acceptable.  Thomas Aquinas agreed.  At some point, hominization was said to be forty days for boys and eighty days after conception for girls.  Innocent XI changes this, and in 1869 Pope Pius IX reinforces a ban on abortion.  Modern U.S. politicians who seek support from so-called pro-choice voters often say they are personally against abortion but vote pro-choice to avoid imposing their beliefs on others (a slippery slope, morals can be different between people) and to uphold the wall of separation between church and state.  After being elected president in 1992, Bill Clinton says of abortion that it should be safe, legal, and rare, but the Democratic Party support of abortion verges on advocacy.  Pro-choice Catholics defy church teaching;  Pope John Paul II said, "It is sometimes claimed that dissent from the Magisterium is totally compatible with being a "good Catholic" and poses no obstacle to the reception of the sacraments. This is a grave error."  Pro-choice Catholics in the U.S., such as Nancy Pelosi, are rarely denied the eucharist.

1680  Pueblo Revolt (Popé's Rebellion) in the future New Mexico kills 400 Spanish, drives out 2000 settlers (some of these are Mexican), with help from 46 Pueblo towns.  Popé orders Catholic (Franciscan) churches to be burned, Spanish livestock and fruit trees destroyed, and this was partially carried out, but Popé's influence declines.  The drought of the 1670s continues and Navajo and Apache continue to raid.  Popé's promised deliverance fails.  See 1598 for Onate's conquest, 1692 for the reconquest.

1680 & 1682 Comets are found to be beyond the Moon, making the Sun and planet spheres changeable, at odds with Aristotle.  Based on Tycho's measurements (he died 1601).  [See 1577, there may be an error in this chronology]

1683 Bernoulli finds the constant e = 2.71828...  while finding the limiting value of compound interest, given an account starting with $1 and having 100% yearly, compound interest.  Interest paid once a year gives $2 at the first anniversary.  Paid every 6 months, it is $2.25.  Paid every 3 months, it is $2.44.  The limit is $2.71828...

Here are some other e facts.

• e = the limit as n goes to infinity, of n / (nth root of n-factorial)

• The slope of ex = ex   for any x   but this is true only for e.           Or, ex is it's own derivative.

• eix = cos(x) +i sin(x), see 1748

• http://mathworld.wolfram.com/e.html : Newton in 1669 found e = sum of 1/k! for k=0 to infinity.

• It also says ei pi +1 = 0    an equation connecting the fundamental numbers i, pi, e, 1, 0, addition, multiplication, exponent.

1685  King Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes & drives Protestants from France.  He had organized the world's first centralized, national government, in part to monitor the nobility & prevent subterfuge.  There were advances in military, draft for the navy, international trading companies & trade treaties favoring France, explorations in the New World & the colony of Louisiana, paper money;   wars against other European countries set France's fortunes ahead.  But opulent palaces & taxation squander GNP, set the stage for French Revolution in which Louis XVI will be guillotined.  The end of the 72 year reign of Louis XIV sees France's maritime power destroyed;  the colonies of Newfoundland and Acadia (see 1755) are ceded to England, thus establishing England in North America at the same time that she was established at Gibraltar.

1686  Newton appears before the Royal Society of London to present his laws of motion, and proclaims audaciously "I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World."        F = ma is learned in modern high school.

1687 Newton's laws including second law of motion    force = mass * acceleration    published in Principia, also gravitational force proportional to product of masses and inversely to square of distance.*  People come to believe that terrestrial physics is the same as celestial physics.  Action at a distance is a big hurdle & Newton did not explain it, he just gave the formula.  In Principia, Newton gathers information from many world sources to support gravitation being the same in space and on the earth.  Comets and cannonballs are said to move by the same inverse-square law    *See 1798 for Cavendish determination of G.     Using Newton's laws and calculus, Newton can derive Kepler's three laws.

1687 Newton writes Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1704 Opticks.  Newton is not a deist (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/) but observes intelligent design and thinks that unaided human reason leads inevitably to the well-grounded belief in God.

1688  The Glorious Revolution in Britain   is complicated for Americans.  Catholics vs. Protestants, the Bill of Rights, the Dutch Republic, Louis XIV of France

1689 Baptist Confession of Faith is also called the Second London Baptist Confession.  It is based on the Westminster Confession.  It is adopted in the next century in Philadelphia.  See Westminster Confession of Faith at 1690 in this time line.

1690s  British law forbidding blasphemy is overturned.  Deists can publish and advance the role of reason.  See Herbert of Cherbury, 1624.

1690  Locke's ideas help pave the way for the French and American revolutions.  An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke has the phrase, "pursuit of happiness."  Some historians think Thomas Jefferson incorporated the idea into the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  Locke means something different from hedonism.  Locke distinguishes between "imaginary" happiness and "true happiness" in light of the possibility of an afterlife where one's estate depends on one's earthly choices.  In his Essay, Locke lays the foundation for modern empiricism, which holds that all knowledge derives from sensory experience and that man is born a “blank slate” or tabula rasa, which many say is not true.  So if Locke is wrong about tabula rasa, does his error extend to the pursuit of happiness?

http://www.biblicalphilosophy.org/Epistemology_Metaphysics/Empiricism_Critique_Ed.asp says that you might be an Empiricist if...

1.  You believe “All truth is God’s truth” or Scripture should be “integrated” with psychology and sociology.

2.  You “believe” that modern science can answer problems of abortion, illegitimate births, poverty, and health.

3.  You believe that people should be counseled by psychologists or psychiatrists.

4.  You are not skeptical of modern medicine, or you are a strong advocate of some form of alternative medicine.

5.  You believe that your vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch never deceive you.

6.  You believe that you understand yourself better than God does.

7.  You believe that all religions have some element of truth, "lead to God," or benefit mankind.

    Empiricism is the predominant philosophy of moderns, but empiricism cannot determine truth.  Christians are better served by understanding the Bible, not blindly following empiricism.

http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/john-locke/

    More about Locke and happiness...

Locke's view of happiness includes the following elements:

•     The desire for happiness is a natural law that is implanted into us by God and motivates everything we do.

•     Happiness is synonymous with pleasure, Unhappiness with pain

•     We must distinguish “false pleasures,” which promise immediate gratification but produce long-term pain, from “true pleasures” which are intense and long lasting

•     The pursuit of happiness is the foundation of individual liberty, since it gives us the ability to make decisions that are in our long-term best interest

•     Since there is a diversity of natures, what causes happiness completely depends on the individual and his or her own experience of pleasure and pain

•     The best bet would be to live a life of virtue so one can win everlasting happiness. Betting on a life of hedonistic pleasure is “irrational” given the prospect of infinite misery

•     The pursuit of happiness is also the foundation of political liberty. Since God has given everyone the desire to pursue happiness as a natural right, the government should not interfere with anyone's pursuit of happiness so long as it doesn't interfere with other's right to pursue happiness.

1690  In Scotland, the Westminster Confession of Faith that has been in effect for the Church of England (Henry VIII's creation) since being ratified by Parliament in 1646 is ratified for Scotland.  It is reform theology, expressing Calvinist orthodoxy with influences of Puritans and covenant theology.  It has minimalist worship and excludes secular activities on Sundays.  It declares the Roman Catholic pope to be the Antichrist.

1692  Liebniz publishes Specimen Dynamicum.  Statics and Dynamics.

1692  Spanish Diego de Vargas starts the reconquest, after the 1680 revolt, of the Pueblo peoples to counter French advance in the Mississippi valley and to counter Apache, Navajo, and others.  With combinations of war and negotiations, the Spanish regain control but allow some degree of native religion to co-exist with Catholicism, and that weakness in Catholicism continues to the present.  European disease does not kill as many Pueblo people as will die in the San Antonio missions from 1700 to 1800.  See 1731 in this time line for the San Antonio missions.

1701 Cadillac (French) with large party in canoes settles what will become Detroit (de twaa)

1704  Newton:  "It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles...as most conduced to the end to which he formed them."  Newton's concept is a "purely mechanical universe of particles colliding in a void," Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb p. 30.  Maxwell adds the electromagnetic field in 1873 but continues a mechanistic view.

1709  Coke from coal starts replacing charcoal for iron-producing blast furnaces (forests were being cut down for charcoal production)

1713  Collins in Britain writes Discourse of Free-thinking, a step toward secular humanism.  This is the first break with faith-based thinking that is noted in this timeline.  See 1404 B.C., "limited freedom of thought."  See Enlightenment in this time line, also Thomas Jefferson at 1770.  See 1827.      1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1714  Fahrenheit in Germany invents first accurate, calibrated thermometer, mercury in glass

1717  Bach, son of a musician, is composing concertos and sonatas

1717  approx. birth date of John Sinclair in Scotland, an ancestor of John Engelbrecht's wife.  Sinclair's side will be victorious in 1746 in the Battle of Culloden in the Scottish Highlands against Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charles, who will seek to return Britain to Catholicism.

1718 Newton speculates that chemical bonding is electrical.  Confirmed by Davy in 1806.  Newton is probably aided by cold, dry air during English winters and availability of silk, both conducive to static electricity.

1726  Harrison builds the "gridiron" pendulum with varying metals to keep a clock pendulum the same length despite temperature variation

1727  modern missionary movement starts with Pietists at Moravian Herrnhut, Germany & Univ. of Halle;  missionaries to West Indies, Guiana, Egypt, S. Africa, Holland, England, & Bethlehem Pennsylvania.  See 1675

1700 more or less    According to Stephen Wolfram around the year 2000, philosophical reasoning starts being supplanted by math (math equations)

1727  Euler, age 20, accepts position in Peter the Great's new Academy in St. Petersburg.  He assumes the math chair in three years when Daniel Bernoulli quits the post during the notorious Bironovschina, during the brutish reign of Empress Anna. Euler "stayed well clear of the court and its intrigues," p. 59 Prime Obsession by Derbyshire 2003.  Euler buries himself in work, continuing his life work of 29 volumes of math, 31 volumes of astronomy and mechanics, etc. 

1729  Bradley finds parallax in star positions due to the earth's orbit around the sun

1729   James Bradley finds speed of light by aberration of light 301000 meters per second.  The next advance is 1849.

1730 Newton & the French Cassinis argue the shape of the earth;  Newton said flattened at poles due to centrifugal force, Cassinis argued egg-shaped.  Newton proven correct by expeditions to Lapland & Peru to measure the degree to one part in 60,000.

1730  Matthew Tindal, British, is controversial with his Deist book, Christianity as Old as Creation.

1731  Spanish missions in San Antonio get a good start.  They eventually provide protection from Comanches and Lipan Apaches.  European disease kills so many Indians in the missions that they decline by 1800.  1745 Franciscans at Mission Espada (Spade) build the dam and aqueduct that have been kept in repair to the current time.

1732  Voltaire writes Micromégas, first story of visitors from other planets

1733  At the site of the future (1840 approx.) Battle of Bandera Pass, ten miles northwest of modern Bandera, TX, the turning point of the Texas-Indian wars.,  Spanish General Bandera defeats Apaches which had been raiding missions in San Antonio.

1734  birth of John Sinclair in Scotland, an ancestor of John Engelbrecht's wife

1737 or 1761 Harrison's marine chronometer allows mariners to find longitude.  It has a bimetal strip with the balance wheel.

1737 Euler, one of the most gifted mathematicians, contributes to the study of the distribution of primes.  He uses the zeta function (1744) and comes up with the Euler Product, an astounding and simple infinite product involving prime numbers that is equal to the simple infinite sum of 1/ns.  See 1859, Riemann.  See 1753 in this timeline.  By the 1840s,  the flowering of analytic number theory.

    Euler's discovery of the zeta function, in the sum form being limited to real numbers (slightly) greater than 1 being the exponents of all the positive integers in the denominators, is detailed in devlin.pdf at empslocal.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/devlin.pdf.  Euler's zeta as an infinite product, not a sum, uses only the prime numbers.  Dirichlet and subsequent mathematicians will generalize to complex numbers to get the L-series, "an extremely powerful tool for the study of the primes."

1737  Following from this time line's notes at 1713 Collins, 1727 modern missionary movement, and 1731  Spanish missions, Whitefield in London and Bristol preaches to large gatherings of the lower classes, who hear about Jesus' forgiveness and respond.      At the time, England was a "moral quagmire and a spiritual cesspool,"  God was almost universally accepted but was distant and cold.  https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1701-1800/evangelical-revival-in-england-11630228.html.      "Deism [thinking about God that is based on reason, discounting life eternal and anything miraculous] was rampant, and a bland, philosophical morality was standard fare in the churches. Sir William Blackstone ... "did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero."  Cicero was the Roman politician, 106 B.C. to 43 B.C.  Drunkenness ...gambling ... bear baiting and cock fighting ... slave trade ... Bishop Berkeley wrote that morality and religion in Britain had collapsed "to a degree that was never known in any Christian country."  Parish Anglican priests resented Whitefield's interference.  John Wesley hears Whitefield and comes alive himself.  Wesley emphasizes repentence, faith, and holiness as alternatives to spiritual emptiness.  Wesley heard multitudes asking, "What must I do to be saved?"  In 1928, Archbishop Davidson will write that "Wesley practically changed the outlook and even the character of the English nation."

     See 1378 or so Wycliffe, 1580 Anabaptists, 1513 The Prince published by Machiavelli, 1514 Copernicus...Man is understood to live on a tiny planet flung out into a space that has no center. It is a time of great confusion, fear, and disputes, 1738 Wesleys, 1746 Princeton, 1755 Rousseau, 1760s First Great Awakening.

1738 Bouguer and La Condamine find that plumb bobs on either side of a mountain do not hang straight down but are attracted slightly toward the mountain, about 1/300 of a degree

1738 John & Charles Wesley:  Aldersgate experience, start of English Methodism which may have saved England from the revolution that France suffered, see 1789.  See 1746, 1760s

1741  Hiorter and Celsius note that the polar aurora is accompanied by a disturbance of the magnetic compass needle

1743  plumbing trap invented for Duke of York to keep gas from sewer from coming up the drain;  whether that was the issue for the Duke, JE can't find on Internet

1743  Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia compares notes with a Bostonian and finds that a storm in Philadelphia also affected Boston, but hours later.  He finds this is a general pattern, that storms seem to move, in various directions for different storms.  This is what we now call fronts (cold and warm fronts).  He did not measure variations in atmospheric pressure but wrote about high- and low-pressure areas.   He notes that fronts can move in directions different from the surface wind.  His thinking about summertime hail leads him to suppose that the upper atmosphere is cold.  His measurements of temperature of the Atlantic during several crossings to Europe, including at some depth, and changes of water color and seaweed lead him to publish a chart of the Gulf Stream and advise ship captains to save time by staying in the Stream when eastbound and avoiding the Stream when westbound.

1746  Leyden jar invented by van Musschenbroek.  For a long time, it is more important than the resistor because it stores energy.  See 1748.    After 1995, the lowest-cost circuit-board part is the surface-mount resistor, which can be had in volume for three for a penny.

1740s  Deism in Britain declines, the leading Deists are "a dreary parade," says Peter Gay.  "The opposing side engrossed the most talent."  In Holland, Spinoza leads a more vigorous branch of Deism.  He is an early Enlightenment thinker and critic of the Bible.  But British, working-class debating societies, and the Frenchman Voltaire, prolong Deism.

1746  Princeton Univ. established by Presbyterians to train evangelists, aids First Great Awakening which challenges humanism of the Enlightenment

1748 to 1780  stability of the Solar System is studied by Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace.  The n-body problem.  See 1841.

mid-1700s  The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment prompt thinking independent of and often contrary to faith-based thinking.  Math, astronomy, physics, politics, economics, philosophy, medicine, music expand.  Astronomy parts ways with astrology.  See 1637 Descartes.     Science at this time is called natural history but science is coming on, see 1637.      Advances in static electricity take experimenters into a field thought to be divine;  the Bible records several cases of lightning or fire consuming sacrifice and Baal worshippers, and most people are hesitant to deal with God's tool.  The general thought is that the experimenters' static is different from lightning, but experimenters start tying the two together, and Enlightenment thinking supports that.

    See in this timeline 1513 Machiavelli and 1637 Decartes for earlier breaks from Christian and Jewish faith.  Also, https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline .  Enlightenment unleashes many free thinkers.  Until this time (see 1704 Newton), most Westerners do not discount God.  Romans 1:18-23 "His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen" increasingly is flouted.  Romans 1:24-28  Three times, "God gave them over."

1748 Benjamin Franklin advances Leyden's 1745 capacitor work by linking 11 flat-glass condensers (capacitors) in a series connection & finds the electric effect to be enhanced;  eventually seen to be 11 times the voltage.  Franklin finds that the energy (though energy is a later term) is stored in the glass (later called dielectric), not the metal.  Faraday later makes large capacitors using oil barrels.  (Probably he made metal cylinders and put a pair, concentrically, in each barrel.  "Oil filled" power transformers are eventually used for AC power distribution, the wires lacking the customary varnish insulation.  The oil gives the insulation.)

    Franklin believes the study of electricity can be advanced even by commoners, in line with how colonists think.    1747  Franklin corresponds with Peter Collinson in London about plus and minus electricity.

1748 Euler publishes what we now call Euler's Formula (or identity), eix = cos x + i sin x    which comes from the Taylor series of ex.  Taylor series is an infinite sum.  It is found for eix to have the same elements, when arranged appropriately, as cos x + i sin x.  Abbreviation is cis(x) for cosine and imaginary sine.

1750 Benjamin Franklin proposes the kite experiment to prove lightning has the nature of static electricity.  Franklin's proposal was for the experimenter to be insulated from ground.  1753  Richmann ignores safety and is the first person killed doing this experiment.  Newspapers report the gory details.  The need to ground lightning rods is established.

1752 England joins France in dropping 10 days from the calendar (Pope Gregory in 1582).  Street riots in London, "give us back our ten days."

1753  Leonhard Euler   "Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate."  See 1737 in this timeline.

    Maybe Euler knew depths of the primes;  he was a genius.  As noted at 1737 in this timeline, Euler used the zeta function, ζ, in some fashion.  But Euler was quite pessimistic, the writer (John E) thinks. 

    Euler certainly knew of Euclid's proof in about 300 B.C. that there are an infinite number of primes. But he probably didn't know that Reimann's hypothesis just 106 years later, in 1859, would be able to predict prime numbers, and he didn't know that digital computers would in the future be able to do trial divisions and use clever tricks to prove primes that have 24 million digits, https://www.npr.org/2018/12/21/679207604/the-world-has-a-new-largest-known-prime-number.   24 million digits would require 7000 pages to print just one number!

    Euler would be interested that several computer languages can work with arbitrary-precision arithmetic, limited only by memory, which is easily in the gigabytes, easily able to handle 24 million digits. Ruby has native arbitrary precision, and Ruby is free.

    https://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html has some of Euler's interaction with other mathematicians about prime numbers. Since Euler's statement says "we," we know he talked to his mathematics colleagues about primes, and they agreed with his pessimism. They were mightily challenged by 30-digit numbers, so it is understandable that Euler would be pessimistic about order in the prime numbers.

    In 1919, 166 years after Euler's pessimism, History of the Theory of Numbers will be a three-volume work by L. E. Dickson summarizing work in number theory, the first volume treating primes. Whether Dickson would have been pessimistic about finding order in primes, I don't know.

    The "order in the sequence of primes" that Euler was pessimistic about is, in my view, best answered by an amateur by investigating prime constellations or k-tuples. Though my mind boggles early on when I look at on-line papers about these constellations, I have done my own sieve work up to 2*3*5*7= 210 to investigate why there are constellations. To me, prime constellations show plenty of order in the sequence of primes.

    There are "recreational mathematicians " who see order in the primes. It is interesting that Euler's pessimism can be countered by John, the writer, who has much less insight than the mighty mathematician. The writer has the benefit of reading what others write in the World Wide Web!

    Euler's zeta function analyzes the harmonic series by using two surprises. 1) an infinite product is used, not an infinite sum. 2) the prime numbers are used.

    Euler was able to make these advances by building on the work that other mathematicians were doing at the time; Euler was not so much of a genius that he could independently pop up with these innovations. On-line papers that hint at Euler's remarkable thinking are free downloads, devlin.pdf and esegarra-2006-thesis.pdf.

    The writer of this time line, John E., can't follow much of the math in these papers but suspects that the prime numbers that Euler took advantage of were of use because of this property of primes:  they are the numbers that cannot be used to make 2-D, rectangular arrangements of tiles. It seems to me that it is statistics and geometry contributing to the analysis of the harmonic series.

    Thinking about Euler's zeta function makes me wonder what type of person it takes to make the big discoveries in math. How many people start college intending to be a math major but change fields when the math looks too intimidating? Do social skills and collegiality make the modern mathematician? Is persistence and an interest in finding patterns critical?  Was Newton (see this timeline 1687 and thereabouts) a higher level of genius than Euler?

1754  Joseph Black discovers through measuring the mass of various "airs" that an air from a reaction with magnesium carbonate is not air.  It is later called carbon dioxide.  This leads to recognition of various types of air.  Black is the end of Aristotle's "elements," earth, water, air, and fire.  Black derives the gas carbon dioxide from limestone, then exposes the resulting lime (quicklime) to air and finds the lime gradually returns to limestone after absorbing enough of the trace carbon dioxide in the air.  When he measures the mass of various airs, the accuracy of his balance is key since he needs to resolve hundredths of a gram out of 100-gram vessels, as air's mass is 1.29g/liter.

1755  Rousseau Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men engenders French Revolution, Marxism, and modern free love.  See comments at 1828.  Rousseau's writing messes up the world to come but also leads him to amorality in his own life.  He and his longest-duration mistress, among others simultaneously, abandoned five children to awful fates at the Hopital des Enfants-Trouves upon birth.  Rousseau Confessions: 

    "I made up my mind cheerfully and without the least scruples...I had...difficulty getting [Therese] to accept this means of preserving her honor.  Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid...[the baby] was deposited by the midwife at the Enfants-Trouves office in the way that was customary.  The following year there came the same inconvenience and the same expedients...I didn't reflect any further, and the mother didn't approve any more fully;  she groaned but obeyed."

    https://probe.org/the-enlightenment-and-belief-in-god/  Rousseau says American Indians are gentle and loving, making Europeans wonder about the doctrine of “original sin.”  Hopi were indeed peaceful but Comanche were raiders.  Karankawa on Texas coast were cannibals.  War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996)  Wikipedia on Iroquois:  The aim of war was to gather live captives.  The captive would be executed after a day-long torture session of burning and removing body parts, before being scalped alive, had hot sand applied to the exposed skull and finally killed by cutting out their hearts.  Afterwards, the victim's body was cut and eaten by the community.

    http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/26/blog/esharp/jean-jacques-rousseaus-greatest-con/ by Elliott Sharp

    Meanness Rousseau admits to in his autobiography, Confessions:

• “There are moments when a man is seized by a sort of madness and should not be judged by his actions.”

• Rousseau before age 13 did something nasty in the home of Madam Clot, whom Rousseau called “the grumpiest old woman I ever knew in my life.”   “This memory still makes me laugh.”

• He stole a ribbon belonging to Madam de Vercillis after she died. When caught with the ribbon, he blamed the theft on Maurienne, the house cook. She was fired.  He excused himself on the basis that the event eventually made him a better person.

• He hid in dark alleyways and revealed...to women walking by.

• In Emile, Rousseau speaks against the ideas of modern feminism.   Women are less rational than men, he said.   “The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young..."  He argued that men might have desired women but did not need them to survive, while women both desired men and needed them.  "She ought to make herself pleasing to him rather than to provoke him; her particular strength lies in her charms; by their means she should compel him to discover his own strength and put it to use."

    https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/confessions-of-jean-jacques-rousseau

    Rousseau is basically belting "Take me or leave me!" to the buttoned-up eighteenth century.   This is when philosophers were questioning everything.  His controversial writings take up the theme of religion explicitly and prompt the Paris courts to prosecute him for blasphemy.  [In the second half of his life, he fled from one country to another because of his transgressions.]  Rousseau has all the markings of a compulsive liar.

    Rousseau declared that humans in earlier times were "noble savages." According to Rousseau, humans are naturally and innately good (see his false idea about native Americans above) and it is "civilization" that turns man into a "beast."  A child is by nature innocence and goodness.

    https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/10/rousseau-the-revolt-against-reason

    Through his elevation of feeling over reason, he became the leading prophet of the ultramodern era that would succeed the so-called age of reason.

    "Madame de Warens, the estranged wife of a landowner, was not your usual church lady...she did not believe in original sin, or Hell, or that it could be sinful to follow one’s natural impulses. She took a fancy to the [young Rousseau, about age 16.  He]...spent several formative years as a sort of cavalier-servant, and occasional sexual partner."  One writer calls de Warens a narcissist.     "Rousseau once moved the world, and whether or not we know it, his influence lives in us."     Rousseau is a long chapter in Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World.

1755 Kant proposes Island Universes idea, confirmed by Slipher using spectroscopy in 1912 & verified by Hubble in 1925

1755–1764 The Expulsion of the Acadians occurs during the French and Indian War in North America.  Longfellow will memorialize it in his popular poem Evangeline, which makes the expulsion well known. According to Basque, the story continues to influence historic accounts of the deportation, overemphasising neutral Acadians and de-emphasising Acadians who resisted the British.  Acadians (Cajuns in Louisiana) are driven to many places.  See 1685.

    The Catholic Church had been the largest single property owner in France, owning 20% of real property.  Many in the structure of the Church carried on a noble lifestyle.

1759  Halley's prediction of a comet re-appearance comes true 17 years after Halley's death

1762  Rousseau writes The Social Contract and is called the father of the French Revolution (27 years later, 1789).  Diderot in Paris had introduced Rousseau to the Encyclopedists.  Diderot will call Rousseau "false, vain as Satan, cruel, hypocritical...sucked ideas from me."  Rousseau angers both Protestants and Catholics by rejecting divine authority and original sin.  He said any person should merely conform to the religion that they are brought up in;  such ideas caused his books to be banned in France and Geneva.  The Archbishop of Paris had his books burned.  Emile outraged the French Parliament.  He would have been arrested but he fled to Switzerland and then Prussia, Paris, London, and the homes of various friends in France, where he died in 1778.  His last 15 years saw Rousseau involve himself in numerous scandals and scandalous writings.    Rousseau destroys the idea of the divine rights of kings.  He advocates for secular justification of government and laws and the consent of the majority.

The Encyclopedia's 28 volumes (compendium of human knowledge, anti-authoritarian, to positively transform society) and the "philosophes," Voltaire, D' Alembert, Diderot, and Montesquieu, are the heart of the Enlightenment.  plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment

1762  King George III advances the Anglican hierarchy against remnants of British Deism, Peter Annet of the Robin Hood Society is jailed.

1763   The Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War in America) ends with the Treaty of Paris. The first war to span the globe, it was chiefly fought between Britain/Prussia/Hanover against France/Austria/Sweden/Saxony/Russia/Spain.

    France and Britain were especially hostile.  The war was fought in colonies around the world.  Britain hoped to remove France as a commercial rival.  France lost all territory in North America, and will lose India in 1799.  Canada becomes British.  The British Empire reigns for 100 years.  Despite the power of the British Empire, the American colonies will band together enough to grind down British determination.  The colonies will win independence through political division in Parliament.  India will be a preoccupation for Britain after France is defeated in India in 1799.

    http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/treaty-of-paris-1763/

    Wikipedia:  Though the Protestant British fear Roman Catholics, Great Britain does not want to antagonize France by forced conversion or expulsion, especially from Canadians moving to other French settlements in North America.  Britain protects Roman Catholics living in Canada.  The Protestant American colonies are disappointed by this protection.  Some say this poisons American–British relations.

    French Acadians had been deported during the Great Expulsion (1755–63).  New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory (see 1803) west of the Mississippi are ceded to Spain for their efforts as a British ally.  The American colonists are freed up from the French threat and start to rethink relations with Britain.  The French and Indian War is a coming of age for the English colonies.  They have a flourishing economy.  But they continue to feel contempt from Britain, which finds the colonists crude and lacking culture.  http://www.ushistory.org/us/8d.asp

    The Treaty of Paris is not the end of France.  Napoleon forms the Grande Armee through conscription.  Through 53 winning battles Napoleon leads France to empire (see 1794 French armies repulse...) but is defeated in 1812 by the Russian winter and in 1815 by Britain at Waterloo.  This is the end of the Holy Roman Empire.  Germany and Italy consolidate.  Spain's American holdings rebel and the British colonies in America rebel.

1760s First Great Awakening influences the American founders;  Backus (Baptist) advances separation of church & state;  democracy encouraged by widespread sentiment of 1) individual salvation by faith, 2) priesthood of believers

1766 Cavendish combines Priestley's oxygen with his own hydrogen, from acid acting on metal, and finds it explodes.  He does this in a strong flask that doesn't blow up and later notes condensed water in the flask.  He is the first to synthesize water.

1767  Michell shows that "double stars" are, in most cases, orbiting each other;  this is gravity far away in space, the same gravity as in the Solar System and with cannonballs

1768  Reimarus' anti-Christian ideas are published after his death (part of the Enlightenment):  Jesus intended to oust the Romans and establish a political kingdom, and they executed the dissident Galilean. Contrary ideas (love your enemies) were the apostles putting words into Jesus’ mouth after his political agenda had failed.  The savior figure is a deliberate deception crafted by the apostles.  See 1835.

1768  Spanish start developing Alta California

1770  Lavoisier starts 20 yrs of chemistry reformation.  Invalidates phlogiston (notes that materials that burn gain mass, they don't lose phlogiston), there are not just four elements (fire, air, water, earth), lists known elements & says more will be found.  (1789  33 elements grouped into gases, metals, earths, and nonmetals.  1869 Mendeleev writes up the modern periodic table.)  He is a French tax collector & is executed during the Terror in the French Revolution, May 1794.

1770 approx.  Thomas Jefferson rejects orthodox Christianity.  http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Faith-Tools/The-Founding-Faith-Archive/The-Pious-Infidel.aspx?p=3       Any religion that eliminated good behavior as the path to salvation merited no respect.  Jefferson did not believe Jesus was divine.  Jefferson also despised the Jews of the Old Testament.  The "vicious ethics" of the Jews were "irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason & morality," encouraged poor relationships between people and were downright "repulsive and anti-social, as respecting other nations."  Moses was depicted as "cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." Though his negative attitude about Judaism seemed mostly confined to antiquity, he occasionally revealed an up-to-date bias.

    https://sounddoctrineministries.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/thomas-jefferson-all-american-heretic/    A leader in The Enlightenment [see 1746 in this timeline], Jefferson was a polymath who spoke five languages and was deeply interested in science, religion and philosophy.  Thomas Jefferson rejected the orthodox Christianity of his day and was especially hostile to the Catholic Church as he saw it operate in France.  See 1790 in this timeline.

    I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, of so much absurdity, so much untruth and imposture"

    Deism in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful Creator. According to deists, the Creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the natural laws of the universe. Deists think “the Supreme Architect” does not alter the universe by intervening in it, known as the Clockwork Universe Theory, in which a god designs and builds the universe, but steps aside to let it run on its own.  Deistic ideas also influenced several leaders of the American and French revolutions, see 1790.  See 1814, determinism.

    In the United States, Enlightenment philosophy plays a major role in creating the principle of religious freedom, expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s letters, and the principle of religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment.  But Baptists are influential, also.    See 1795, 1820.

    1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1770 areas of west Africa coast are depopulated by slave raiders, slave trade to America declines

1772  The first evidence that gases participate in photosynthesis is reported by Joseph Priestley in 1772.  In 1778,  Ingen-Housz observes the effect of Priestley but only when the plant is illuminated.

1772 Walsh in England corresponds with Benjamin Franklin in colonies about the torpedo fish, which generates electricity like the electric eel.  See 1776.

1774  birth of Neil Sinclair in Argyllshire, Scotland, an ancestor of John Engelbrecht's wife.  In this generation, birth of Dr. Benjamin Briggs in Virginia.  He will move to Navasota, Texas where the family will live for four generations.  Briggs is an ancestor of Dr. Elbert Leggett, father of a cousin of John Engelbrecht's wife.  In 1836, Dr. Briggs will sign the Texas Declaration of Independence in Washington on the Brazos, 6 miles west of Navasota.   Irish Rebellions

1775  French Academy of Sciences declares perpetual-motion machines to be invalid

1775  In music, Baroque (see 1600) & Rococo periods are followed by Classical period, until 1825.  Public concerts are first played with Classical music, in the Age of Enlightenment.  Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven.  Vienna is the center.  Classical music changes chords much less frequently than Baroque.

1776  Watt commercializes his steam-piston engine for pumping water from mines, replacing horse-powered bucket system and the inefficient Newcomen engine.  Piston & cylinder machining technology come from Carron works in Scotland which will produce cannons for British defeat of French fleet at Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

1776  Walsh sees a spark from an electric eel, proving it makes electricity

1776 July 4   Congress passes Declaration of Independence but many colonists remain quietly loyal to King George III

1776  Written by Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence of the British colonies in America:  inalienable natural rights which are "endowed by their Creator."  (See 1795 Bentham)  In contrast, the French Revolution (see 1789) has no such statement since the French Revolution will be a revolt against the monarchy and the Catholic Church, which is the undoing of religion in France.  See 1215  Magna Carta in this timeline.

    Thomas Jefferson and other deists think a reasoned ethical system will provide the substantive core of a "civil religion" ("We hold these truths to be self-evident") that would guide behavior without a state religion.  See 2017 May in this timeline   New Oxford Review http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0517-gregor           The way that Progressives in the U.S. behave (BLM, Antifa, progressive Democrats, AOC, progressive Gen Z)  (largely in favor of LGBT rights, gender equality, and access to abortion. Economically, Generation Z has a more favorable outlook on socialism than previous generations), they don't like spiritual religion or civil religion, they don't like hierarchical control, and they think that free thinking is the way to go. And in Pres. Joe Biden's second year, it is going poorly and Republicans hope to take back Congress.  See 2017 Nov p.6 NOR, two paragraphs below.

2022 Ap New Oxford Review p. 34  A review of Jewish Ben Shapiro's The Right Side of History:  How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.  I note in this Catholic reviewer's comments "particularly noxious have been Lutheranism and Islam," "arch-heretic Martin Luther," "the Locke-cribbed drivel of the Declaration of Independence," "disaster of the Reformation", "liberal-Protestant America is fundamentally incompatible with the true Catholic vision of man and the cosmos," "Kant's laughably fake metaphysics," "Shapiro, a Jewish man, desperately trying to apologize for the wreck of Christendom that Protestant and Enlightenment rebels brought about."   These Catholic ideas prevail until Vatican Council II in 1962, see this time line.

    2017 Nov p. 6 New Oxford Review George Washington and all the framers of the U.S. Constitution knew that "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."           In 2022, https://www.weforum.org/great-reset       "Help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons...the Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract" by 2030.  Glenn Beck warns that this is facsim, creeping U.S. govt appropriation of all possessions.  A reviewer of his book:  "America is being destroyed, both from within by Americans who are traitors to the United States, & from without by countries who care not a whit for us, thanks to our State Department who has for decades worked overtime alienating them from the U.S.  It is a well organized plan that has been in the works for decades by the Communists & their funding pals.  All with one goal:  take down America to pave the way to build a one world government."

1776  The Wealth of Nations  the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith.  What builds nations' wealth;  is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.   http://thegreatestbooks.org/nonfiction  list is generated from 107 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources.

1777 Lavoisier states that the elements are, for example, metals, not the ores.  Previously, the ore was considered to be the pure element.  Phlogiston comes into disrepute.  1779 Calls the respirable and flame-supporting component of air oxygen.

1777 Vermont is first entity in U.S. to forbid slavery, there being few slaves in Vermont

1779  First cast-iron bridge in England, over the Severn River.  The builder remains in debt the rest of his life.  The bridge still stands.

1779  Spain takes the side of the colonies in the American Revolution.  Spain defeats British armies in Louisiana and Alabama, then in the Battle of Pensacola.  Without Spanish help, British power would have been more squarely focused on the colonies.

1779  (1779 is when Virginia ended tax revenue going to Anglican church.)  Disestablishment is a topic in the origin of the United States.  That means dis, against, the establishment of a religious body's authority in governing.  Encyclopedia Britanica web site...disestablishment is a feature in the American Revolution that is a radical feature, departing radically from the establishment of religious authority in European countries, where stability was thought to require civil government to work with religion.  Colonial America in the North has an establishment of Congregationalism, and in the South is Anglicanism, the Church of England, hailing from King Henry VIII's bloody split from Roman Catholics.  

     Quaker William Penn in Pennsylvania had endured persecution in England, and he enforces disestablishment in the Pennsylvania colony.  In Anglican Virginia, on the other hand, taxes build church buildings and pay wages to priests.  Thomas Jefferson, with the reputation of atheist, works for disestablishment in Virginia, waging "the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged."  Jefferson and James Madison are aided by Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians.    

     The first ammendment to the new U.S. Constitution, forbidding "establishment of religion," is ratified by the states in 1791.  But the states are not forbidden to make establishment.

     In New England, Congregationalists hold onto establishment and are aided by Yale College.  Around 1817, disestablishment will be firm in all state constitutions except for Massachusetts, passing away there in 1833.

     Wikipedia in Autonomy notes that a second disestablishment will follow WWII and the Great Depression, when people return to protestant churches, but there is no move toward establishing any religious authorty in government.  Baby boomers will have different spiritual attitudes than the parents and will cause various social revolutions in the 1960s, such as the sexual revolution.  A third disestablishment will be from the free thinkers following the 1960s.

1780  Voltaire, a deist but not an atheist, writes his last contribution to Diderot's Encyclopedia.  Themes:  free thinking, Enlightenment, revolution.  Attitudes are anti-Catholic and anti-aristocratic, but this affects intellectuals, not ordinary people.  Advances the thinking of those who bring about the French Revolution, see 1789.  Voltaire was twice in the Bastille;  he was exiled for a time in London and there learned about deism and the English Enlightenment.  His Candide shows his hatred of Christian orthodoxy, particularly that of Catholics.

1780  Lavoisier notes energy in phase change (melting, boiling) though energy is not understood in the modern sense.  Laplace and Lavoisier measure oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production, and heat generation of a guinea pig and note a striking resemblance to the burning of charcoal.

1781  Messier publishes catalog of non-star things:  galaxies, clusters, nebulae.  (He did this to publicize which things had already been seen & did not need to be re-investigated.)  But they are indistinct in small telescopes.   The Messier Catalog designations, like M31, are still in use in the 2020s.    See 1923 Mt. Wilson.

1782 Feb 27  British parliament has been edging toward ending war on colonies, finally a majority votes to end war.  Peace talks in Paris in April.

1782   "Too many notes, my dear Mozart," Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II said when he heard "The Abduction From the Seraglio."  But Mozart extended his orchestral drama even more in later operas such as "The Marriage of Figaro."  1986 The Secret House by Bodanis, Simon & Schuster p. 148:  the new opera houses provided more sound damping (less echo) than stone churches & allowed more notes per beat & instruments with higher pitch, flute & violin.  1981:  marriage of Diana & Charles at St Paul's Cathedral, London is with slow music because it is known beforehand that echo in the stone building would spoil faster music.

1783  Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon takes a man up for the first time, in Paris.  Fad of ballooning, including hydrogen balloons.

1784 or 1777  Coulomb's Law:  attraction/repulsion of static charges is product of charges divided by square of separation, like gravity.  His instrument is a magnet suspended by a long string.

1784  What is Enlightenment?  Immanuel Kant defined the Aufklärung as the capacity to think by oneself, without referring to an exterior authority, be it a prince or tradition:  Enlightenment is when a person leaves behind a state of immaturity and dependence (Unmündigkeit) for which they themselves were responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence or education, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.

1784  Kant's explanation of the Enlightenment:  “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity”, its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.  The Enlightenment’s motto: “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.     The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classical liberalism of the first half of the 19th. Provoked by challenges to conventional wisdom from science and the explorers, mindful of the bloodshed of recent wars of religion, and abetted by the easy movement of ideas and people, the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism and progress.  In this web site's pages about modern morals, Pinker has a book about these four themes:  https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline/getting-specific-about-what-morals-are/steven-pinker-smart-modern-atheist

1787  higher criticism is first employed by German Eichhorn, in Einleitung. Deals with the larger aspects of Bible study:  authorship, date, composition, and authority of whole books or large sections, as distinguished from the discussion of textual minutiæ, which is the sphere of the lower, or textual, criticism.  Higher criticism comes to assert that the Bible is not an exceptional narrative but should be reduced to the level of folk tale and legend.    1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1787  Alexander Tytler  A democracy is always temporary in nature.  LarryWillis.com/quotes.htm   New Oxford Review Sept. 2019 p. 20  Since 5th century B.C., observations at various times that democracies have limited lifetimes because of an inherent instability exemplified by the fickleness of public opinion on complicated issues such as foreign policy (in the U.S., pacifists during WWI and WWII) and an internal tendency toward lowest common denominator, bread and circuses.  Voters find they can increase their income from the public treasury.  Then comes collapse and dictator.  Application:  Pres. Donald Trump is in many ways conservative but knows that reining in deficit spending is a losing cause, so he scarcely brings it up.  Congress continues to rely on foreign debt (largely financed by China) to prop up domestic spending and foreign aid.

    See 1637 in this time line:  "about 150 years after Descartes all that was fundamentally Christian in the tradition of European thought had already been pushed aside."      Look at what is going on in Europe in the late 1700s and you see what Descartes wrought.  The big question is whether it would have happened if Descartes had been of a different mind.    The depradations of the French Revolution are about to explode, see 1789.

1787 Gauss, at age 10, shows his intellect.  The schoolmaster sets the class to adding up all numbers from 1 to 100, "to give himself a half-hour break," p. 48 in Prime Obsession by Derbyshire.  The ten-year-old Gauss lists the first 100 numbers,

1   2   3    4    5   6   7  8  9  10  11 12 13 14 15... 100

and underneath lists the same in reverse order,

100 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 ...1.

    Adding vertically, he gets 101, one hundred times.  He does 101 x 100, getting 10100, halves that to get 5050, writes it on a slate, tosses the slate on the master's table, and announces, Ligget se!, "There it is!"  Actually, he did all the math in his head, and took just moments to do it.  Gauss spends most of his life heading the observatory of Gottingen Univ.  He publishes much less than he studies, and several times draws the ire of other academicians by offhandedly telling them that he had, years before, discovered things that they thought they had originated.  Example:  Legendre publishes the method of least squares in 1809, then Gauss says he came up with that in 1794 (but didn't bother to publish). 

    Gauss at age 20  "such an overwhelming horde of ideas stormed my mind before I was twenty that I could hardly control them and had time but for a small fraction"

1787   New Oxford Review Nov 2017 p. 6  George Washington and all the framers of the U.S. Constitution knew that "Government is not reason;  it is not eloquence;  it is force.  Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."  See this timeline at 1788 Kant, 1789 and following (French Revolution), 1918 Russia (Lenin acting for Marx, state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, 7 million dead).

1788  Philosopher Kant takes himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy. His beliefs continue to have a major influence on modern philosophy.  Politically, Kant is one of the earliest exponents of the idea that perpetual peace can be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation. He believes this eventually will be the outcome of universal history, although it is not rationally planned.  The nature of Kant's religious ideas continue to be debated, with viewpoints ranging from atheist, exploding the ontological argument for God's existence, to more critical treatments epitomized by Nietzsche.  (excerpted from Wikipedia)  See Descartes 1637 in this timeline.

1789  France is on it's descent to revolution.   This time line covers the Revolution down to 1794, see 1794 By 1810, the ideals of the French Revolution...      Louis XVI, a weak leader, convenes States General, of nobility, Catholic clergy, & third estate to write a constitution.  July 14 Insurrection at Bastille, public no longer considers royalty to be absolute.  Aug 4 Feudal rights abolished, equality declared.  Upon adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Catholicism ceases to be the state religion, & a movement gathers force to subject Catholicism to the state.  (20% of French property owned by Church until confiscations)  Oct 6 Louis XVI returned to Paris from Versailles by a mob.  Dec 17 Catholic property confiscated to satisfy public debt, Catholics who were subject to vows are declared to be released from them. 

1790  French Catholic orders & congregations suppressed.  Pope Pius VI objects.  The Constituent Assembly develops the Civil Constitution of the Clergy;  priests & bishops obliged to take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution. Louis XVI sanctions the Civil Constitution under threat of riots.  Priests divide into political camps, for the Pope or for the Constitution.  "Reason" takes the place of spiritualism but is subverted by violence as the tool to overthrow kings and Catholicism.

1790  the disruption accompanying the American Revolution suppressed churches & seminaries;  only 10% of Americans profess Christianity;  anti-Christian influences of Thomas Paine (see 1794), Voltaire, Deism (see 1770 approx.);  atheism is a fad

1790  equal temperament is becoming the standard for Western music, displacing well & mean-tone temperament.  Equal temperament persists to the present time & is considered in the West to be the only correct temperament, though violin & other instruments which aren't fixed-pitch are often played to produce low-integer-ratio chords.

1790  Hutton devises one of geology’s fundamental principles – uniformitarianism – which says that the same natural processes we see operating today are the ones that have always operated, and that these everyday natural processes have shaped our world.  His proposal is a consequence of his study of rocks and speculation of an age of the earth far exceeding 6000 years.  The alternative idea is catastrophism, that most rocks come suddenly from catastrophies such as landslides and floods such as Noah's flood.  These competing ideas are pushed to their extremes in modern, simplistic, evolution vs. creation arguments, the former saying that the age of an undersea sediment is predictable by a depostion rate that is uniform over millennia, and the latter saying that the bulk of sedimentation comes from volcanoes, landslides, floods, and other catastrophes.  See this timeline, 1980s, Nuuanu debris avalanche off Hawaii.

1791  French Constituent Assembly forbids nonjuring priests to preach.  Attacks on nuns begin. Louis XVI flees as far as Varennes but is returned.  Sept 30 Half of Frenchmen do not want the new church.  Riots in the provinces, followers of pope killed.  Nov 29 The new Legislative Assembly sanctions nonjuring priests.  Louis XVI vetoes it.  Nations surrounding France threaten invasion.  June 20 A mob abuses the king & family.  Deportations of priests to equatorial Guiana, alongside Brazil.  Prussian invasion; panicked Parisians murder thousands faithful to pope.  Sept 21 The Republic proclaimed.  Hostility toward all of Christianity arises.  900 Jacobin clubs throughout France are the hotbeds of revolution and foes of Catholicism.

1792 Aug 10   Ça Ira, "here it goes," is the cry in the streets of Paris at 12:45 A.M., as the greatest violence of the French Revolution breaks out.    The mountain-of-a-man Danton, disfigured from crossing bulls and pigs, seizes Roederer by the throat, convincing the man to go to King Louis in the Tuileries Palace and convince the royal family to take refuge with the National Assembly, just a short walk away.  Danton favors death for Louis, but later.  "People are set on killing the King today, but I don't regard this as necessary...His death would complicate things enormously, and I am therefore against the whole idea of the King's execution.  What I want you to do is put the fear of God into him--persuade him to leave the palace and seek asylum with the Assembly.  There we shall have him surrounded, and can proceed to arrange his deposition at our leisure."  The Swiss Guard, numbering 600, remain loyal to the King as the royal family walks out of the palace.  A mob attacks the palace and the Guard opens fire.  The mob flees, regroups, and overcomes the Guard, killing and mutilating most.   Ref:  The Guillotine and the Cross Carroll 1986

1792 Aug 29  Searches are made in Paris residences for arms, people who are hiding, and people who are absent from their homes.  4000 are imprisoned.

1792 Sept 20   Battle of Valmy between Duke Karl Wilhelm's Prussian invaders, instigated by 5000 Frenchmen who had fled the madness of Paris, and a French army (deprived of experienced commanders by the politics of the Paris Revolution) of General Dumouriez, just 100 miles from Paris, is concluded after a minor cannon exchange, sparing Paris and allowing the revolutionaries to continue their carnage.  It is speculated by Richard Kurin and Warren Carroll (The Guillotine and the Cross, 1986, p. 54) that Duke Wilhelm, a diamond collector, was bought off with a 40-carat fragment of the Blue Diamond of the Golden Fleece, stolen from the French crown jewels while the jewels were lightly guarded in revolutionary Paris.  The leader of the Revolution, the mountainous and disfigured Georges-Jacques Danton, may have been part of this intrigue.  This is the speculated origin of the Hope Diamond.

1792 Nov 6  French General Dumouriez's army invades Brussels, refuge of many French aristocrats on the Paris death list.  Rape and looting.  The Paris revolution threatens all of Europe:  the National Convention in Paris decrees it's support for any insurrection against monarchy.       The Convention meets in the former royal riding academy and places political groups on the left (violent revolutionaries), the right (Girondin), and the Plain or the Marsh, where delegates try to stay out of sight and out of trouble,

 1793 to 1796  The Vendee, in the central-west of France, resists the republican government.  The Vendeeans – loyal to both king and the pre-constitutional church – pay a heavy price (around 100,000 dead, far exceeding the Reign of Terror, with farms & forests burned).  The inhabitants of the Vendee are predominately peasants but had suffered less from the inequalities which existed before the revolution. Vendeeans were treated well by their nobility, who resided in the province rather than ruling it in absentia.  The initial resistance was to drive out the national troops with minimal weaponry.  The Vendee is obliged to pay taxes and produce conscripts for the army, but they mainly want to be left alone and be spared Voltaire and Rousseau, the atheism and church persecution coming from the Republic in Paris.          6,000 people – including 400 children – are guillotined or drowned.                   Compare to modern U.S.:  how many Americans in fly-over territory want to be spared the atheism coming from the American intelligentsia?  The insistence on equity, equal outcomes regardless of gender and personal initiative?  Coercion with Affordable Care Act?  (It was never designed to be affordable.)  The Obama policy that considers the U.S. to be no better than any other nation?  Government funding, from tax revenue, of abortion through Planned Parenthood, which hides most of it's abortion expenses under other accounts?  Government control, and over-regulation from government agencies?  The school control coming from Washington D.C., such as the transsexual controversy in 2016?  The insistence from radical h             that, plainly speaking, s_ _ _ _ _  be accepted as normal behavior?   

1793 Jan 2    Louis XVI executed on a vote of 387 to 334.  Some had suggested he be exiled to America.       Jan 1793  Prime Minister William Pitt in London:  "state after state will be subverted under the power of France, we must now declare our firm resolution effectually to oppose those principles...which have for their object the destruction of England, of Europe, and of the world."    Feb 1793 Danton advises annexation of Belgium, "then priests, nobles, and aristocrats will be swept away, leaving a land of freedom behind them."  The Convention declares war on England.      Foreign incursions continue.  Ap 6 Committee of Public Safety begins the Terror.  A papal internuncio continues in Paris, in secret.  New defensive armies formed, French soldiers are to elect their own officers.  Danton's wild nights in Paris are the talk of the town.  Danton prints his own counterfeit notes in Liege.     June 12 Danton proposes marriage to Louise Gely;  she accepts on two conditions:  Danton must go to confession with a priest faithful to the Pope, and the marriage ceremony must be conducted by such a priest.  Danton's acceptance turns him away from radical action and brings him into conflict with Robespierre.   Sept 17  Law of Suspects requires anyone in good standing to have a certificate issued by a local committee of surveillance;  much corruption and fulfillment of grudges accompanies this.  Saint-Just:  "A nation regenerates itself only upon heaps of corpses."   Oct 16 Marie Antoinette executed.   Oct 29 Fouquier-Tinville    the Convention should "do away with all formalities which impede its work" such as rules of evidence and right to defense.      Crazed informants;  30000 imprisoned, mounting to 200000.  Even priests who took the oath are suspect.  A revolutionary calendar replaces the Christian calendar, church bells melted down.  Priests compelled to marry.  Nov 10 Notre Dame Cathedral changed to the Temple of Reason      Sunday rest suppressed in favor of a rest every 10 days      Civil cults react against faithful Catholic laity.  Robespierre (architect of the Terror) vs. Hebert & Clootz, competition at the guillotine. 

1793  The Cult of Reason is France's first state-sponsored atheistic religion.  It replaces Catholicism.  In 1794, it is replaced by the Cult of the Supreme Being, Robespierre's idea.  In 1802, Napoleon will outlaw both cults.

1794  French armies repulse surrounding nations, even the British navy can't hold back a grain shipment from America, June 2.     Desmoulin's Old Cordelier newspaper calls for moderation of the Terror;  popular among terrorized Parisians.     The Convention increasingly rules by fear.  Trial before execution is dispensed with.   Ap 5 In a contest for power between Danton and Robespierre, Danton loses.  His jury among the Convention is threatened with the guillotine if they fail to convict Danton.       June 12 Fouche, an opponent of Robespierre, is marked for execution but escapes into Paris.  In nightly visits to many of the Convention and even of the Committee of Public Safety, he warns that Robespierre has them on an execution list, and he changes many minds.  Robespierre addresses the Convention:  "In your midst is a swarm of rascals who are fighting against public virtue."  Robespierre's excesses finally lose the Convention to him.  In the end, amid pandemonium, he runs to deputies whom he fashions to be his supporters but is rebuffed.  Stanley Loomis:  "The frantic creature rose to his feet for the last time and turned with a despairing glance towards the galleries...those of them who might have been loyal...now abandoned their doomed leader."  Through a night of tumult, Robespierre and others are taken to one place and another.  An armed force finds them in City Hall at 2 A.M.;  Robespierre is shot in the jaw.  The next afternoon, they are convicted, and by Robespierre's own law, there is no defense and no trial.  He is hauled in a death cart by a circuitous route for three hours, subject to jeers of the public, to the guillotine and executed.  End of the Terror on July 27.  

    Sanctions against Catholics ease.  Metric system adopted, Bureau of Longitudes.  Liberal initiatives concerning education dwindle away.  Napoleon in Italy shows mercy to papal states.  Hundreds of faithful priests had been deported to equatorial Guiana, die on the shore.

    The coming communist Russian Revolution, 1917, revisits terror on a population.  A common thread is the absence of Christian influence.

1790s  Deism is politically charged in England.  Reformers are the Deists, and they are strangled, so to speak, by the powers that be.  But the Deists struggle on.  They control the London Corresponding Society and call for the overthrow of tyranny.  (They had cheered the overthrow of French Catholicism.)  Many Deists are caught and sent to Australia.

1794  http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/singlehtml.htm  following purple is from Age of Reason by Thomas Paine    Talk about hard hearted...   Paine's Age of Reason popularizes deism throughout the USA and Europe.

    The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood [see since 1789 in this timeline], and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition...we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.

    As several of my colleagues and others of my fellow-citizens of France have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.

    I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

    I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

...

    Soon after I had published the pamphlet Common Sense, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.

    Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

    Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

    It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication...it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

    When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not.

    It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story.

    It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand.

    But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon-day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.  Paine read and rejected John 20:26-29:  Jesus said, "Stop doubting and believe...Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."   

1794  https://faculty.unlv.edu/kirschen/2011Fall/ENG232/Enlightenment-voltaire-slideshow.pdf     The French Revolution stirred the imagination of nearly all Europeans. The French revolutionaries, that is those men and women who made conscious choices, sensed in their hearts and minds that they were witnessing the birth of a new age, the dawn of a new era. And if the revolutionaries of Paris, Bordeaux, Lyons or Toulouse knew they were innovating, knew they were helping to usher in the dawn of a New Jerusalem, so too did observers in London, Berlin, Philadelphia, Moscow, Manchester, Geneva, Amsterdam or Boston. New institutions were created on the foundations of Reason and justice and not authority or blind faith.         1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1807  Hegel and Germany after French Revolution

    By 1810, the ideals of the French Revolution find their resting place in the processes of industrial capitalism. Napoleon’s empire liquidates the radical tendencies and at the same time consolidates the economic consequences of the revolution. The French philosophers of the period interpret the realization of reason as the liberation of industry. Expanding industrial production seems capable of providing all the necessary means to gratify human wants. Thus, at the same time that Hegel elaborates his system, Saint-Simon in France exalts industry as the sole power that can lead mankind to a free and rational society.   https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/reason/introduction.htm

1794 - Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, develops one of the first theories of evolution in his book, Zoonomia. All life evolved from one common ancestor which over time branched off into all the species we see today. Transmutation of species is driven by competition and sexual selection.   1809 - Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique states that animals evolve from simpler forms. Lamarck sees evolution as a goal oriented process striving towards perfection.   http://www.aboutdarwin.com/literature/Pre_Dar.html    There are numerous writers who had evolution ideas, back to 520 B.C.  See 1844 and Charles Darwin at 1859.

1794  British Joseph Priestley flees riots & goes to America.  He is acknowledged to be an atheist clergyman & contributor to Unitarianism;  discoverer of oxygen.  Gaseous oxygen will come to be known for its unique connection to life, Krauss ATOM p. 173.  1) Oxidation releases a  lot of heat.  2) Oxidation has a high treshold for reaction.  3) Reaction products (CO2 and H2O) are nearly inert.

1794  logarithm tables to 19 decimal places (some to 24 places) calculated in Paris in duplicate to prevent errors, contained in 17 large volumes

1794   Whitney patents cotton gin, but lawsuits over patent rob him of profit

1794  the element yttrium is found in Sweden to have photoactive properties like phosphorous, emitting red in cathode-ray tubes;  the first "rare earth" so used.  The rare earths turn out to not be so rare.

1795  the meter defined as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian through Paris.  It is later measured by Delambre and Mechain, relative uncertainty of 10−4.   Next determination is 1799.

1795  English philosopher Jeremy Bentham calls the Declaration of Independence's rights endowed by a Creator "nonsense on stilts" and a hindrance to good government. (See 1776)  Ditto for natural rights written into the Constitution.  See 1908 Woodrow Wilson.      http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/ published by Bentham in 1816.            1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1795  start of Second Great Awakening;  Arminianism over Calvinism;  the ability of sinners to repent;  camp meetings follow the frontier westward;  Yale a center for evangelicals, Taylor at Yale appeals to logic over emotion in responding to the Gospel message;  temperance and abolition.  In America, this is the end of Deism.

     (see 1804)             Seen from the late twentieth century, it is apparent why Christianity is regarded by modern Europeans as irrelevant.  1) France outlawed the Catholic Church during the Revolution.  2) The Enlightenment gave new ways of thinking about values, government, and morals.  Most of these ways of thinking are futile, in terms of Ecclesiastes 1:2-3 and 12:13-14, as they ignore the natural depravity of man and the need to accept Jesus' forgiveness that allows the individual to become a new creation, 2 Corinthians 5:17.  3) Europe has suffered so much from war between Islam and the West (including Crusades), and between Catholics and Protestants.  4) Much of Catholic rule of Europe was amid corruption.  5) Alternate philosophies (nihilism and many more) are given much attention by Europeans.  Americans are held in contempt for their lack of sophistication. https://europeisnotdead.com/disco/books-of-europe/european-philosophers/      6) Wars, Marxism, and Communism coming from Germany and Russia reduced generations of Europeans to poverty, death, and despair.

    Orthodox Christianity in Europe is pushed aside   See also in this time line  1787  Alexander Tytler    and    1637  Descartes      and     notes about Enlightenment just before 1637    and     how America did not suffer the same fate:  1746 Princeton Univ. established by Presbyterians to train evangelists, 1760s First Great Awakening, 1795 Second Great Awakening

1796 May 12  A Mexican, Cecilio Valerio in Mier, Mexico is born.  This starts a story that is recounted on a big sign in the tiny settlement of La Rosita in Duval County, discovered by John Engelbrecht and relatives, traveling on June 19 2025 while trying to find the in-situ uranium mining sites in Duval County (Rosita Central Processing Plant and Palangana Ranch site).  (2005 is the last Time Line mention of Valerio and La Rosita, there are several Time Line entries for this story.)    Mier, as mentioned, is a few miles south of the U.S. border, south of westernmost Starr County.  One county north is Jim Hogg County, then Duval County, where the Valerios ended up, but in the 1830s they lived near the Driscoll Ranch west of Corpus Christi.  See 1830s in this time line for the continuing story.     Duval County is settled by many Mexicans from Mier.  Maybe they fled political corruption and violence that led up to the the Mexican Revolution, starting 1910.  Another instance of Roman Catholics fleeing Mexico is the Cordi-Marian sisters who fled Mexico in 1926 and live since 1957 in their compound south of Culebra Road, beside Taft High School, having moved from downtown San Antonio.  JE greets sisters in HEB in 2025.

1798 Oct 11  President John Adams addressed the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts in a letter:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

      1800 approx.  President John Adams said, "It is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand."

1798  Cavendish accomplishes one of the great scientific measurements, on a par with J.J. Thomson's electron charge, he uses lead balls in a fully enclosed, brick building without drafts to find the gravitational constant, and finds the mass of the earth.   Lord Henry Cavendish uses Coulomb's torsion balance with a 2-foot-long beam and four lead balls to measure the value of G, universal gravitational constant.  His value is just .01% off the modern value.  Greater accuracy is attained only after 100 years.  The gravitational force between Cavendish's small and large masses is one two-hundred-millionth of the gravitational force of the small mass toward the earth.  Pasco makes a $2800 classroom set to make this measurement.  The torsion is provided by a beryllium-copper ribbon, 26 cm long with a cross section of 0.0178 x 0.15 mm.  The ribbon can be expected to break once in a while.  Replacements are $50 each.  The balls are tungsten rather than lead, $700 value included in the set.  The restoring force of the ribbon is so slight that the oscillation period is 8 minutes.  Full measurement takes hours.  Stray static attraction must be discharged during measurement.    See 1687 for Newton's formula that Cavendish uses.

1798  Count Rumford sees that heat generated by boring a cannon is evidence that heat is not caloric (a fluid).  In 50 years, caloric is dropped.

1798  Whitney of the cotton gin contracts with govt. for muskets, begins interchangeable parts;  he is credited as being a pioneer of American manufacturing

1798  Legendre publishes Essay on the Theory of Numbers, the number of primes (the Prime Number Theorem) below x is about x/(natural log of x - A) where A=1.08366.  This is the prime counting function and is well known to Riemann, later.  Gauss had come up with the same function six years earlier but had not published.  Gauss saw the A term and said it is really zero.

1798  Jomard, a French savant in the company of Napoleon's army, measures the apothem (slant height) of Great Pyramid of Cheops as 184.722 meters, though Le Pere & Coutelle found Jomard's measure of the base to be 2m too short.  He finds arithmetic coincidences that indicate the ancient Egyptians knew the size of the earth much more accurately than the Greeks and may have been the founders of geometry, agreeing with Herodotus & Plato.  150 Turks clear debris from the NE & NW corners;  French find 20"-deep sockets in bedrock, 10' x 12', where pyramid's cornerstones had been.

1799  Fundamental Theorem of Algebra first proved by Gauss.  Any polynomial of degree n...has n roots, but complex numbers are often needed.  See 1801.

1799  metric system has units so well coordinated that, in 1905, E = m c2 with no conversion constants

1799  the meter is defined by a platinum bar in Paris, relative uncertainty of 10−5, 10 times better than 1795. Next determination is 1889

1799  Davy is the first to inhale a lot of nitrous oxide, laughing gas.  1800 Royal Institution founded, Davy is a popular lecturer.

1799  Rosetta Stone found in Nile delta, allows deciphering of hieroglyphs

    Around 1800, scientific discoveries, which had been made in parlors and basements, are increasingly made with the use of precision, expensive equipment and exotic chemicals and metals.  This means that modern, amateur scientists can't come up with much that is new.  But single-minded amateur astronomers with $5000 of telescope and facility can find comets and asteroids, rarely.

1800  Herschel finds infrared radiation in sunlight when he measures the "temperature" of various colors, separated by a prism, with thermometers but finds the highest temperature just beyond red

1800  Volta makes the Voltaic pile, the first battery.  He models it on the anatomy of the electric torpedo fish, see 1772.  This is a big step ahead;  electricity before was just static.  In mere weeks, William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle use a pile for the electrolysis of water.  Thirty years later, a Voltaic pile supplies enough current for Oersted to find magnetism around a wire.

1800   Schleiermacher the father of Liberal Protestantism, which wanes after WWII.  Schleiermacher contests orthodoxy.  Theological liberalism pays much attention to Darwin and states that man is essentially good.  Harnack and Rauschenbusch contribute to the modern social gospel movement, which defines the kingdom of God as those who are ethically interested, sees the kingdom as being progressively realized in the twentieth century, and diverts concentration from doctrine to social application.  Wieman at the University of Chicago (the Chicago School) rejects theological tradition.  He considers it dangerous for people to believe in a transcendent, supernatural God.  Modern Fundamentalism, the term coming into use in 1910 to 1920, strives to counter liberalism.  It pays attention to Protestant orthodoxy, the redemption of Christ, the validity of the supernatural and miracles, and the authority of the Bible.  (Austin's Topical History of Christianity)             1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1801 Gauss proves the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.  Any integer greater than 1 can be expressed as the product of prime numbers in only one way.  This is a corollary of a theory from Euclid, about 250 B.C., Proposition 14 of Book 9, Elements       See 1899.

    .Gauss:  "Mathematics is the queen of the sciences--and number theory is the queen of mathematics."

1801 Gauss discovers an asteroid

1802  the Ideal Gas Law  PV = nRT  relates pressure, volume, temperature, and the number of moles of the gas

1802  Young determines that visible light is 424 to 675 nm

1802  Wollaston finds dark bands (absorption bands, Frauenhofer or Fraunhofer spectrum) in the spectrum of sunlight, starting the identification of elements in the solar corona and photosphere.  Fraunhofer brings precision to this study.  Spectroscopy shows that elements on Earth are the same as in stars.

1803  wooden-clock industry starts in America, powered by weights.  Itinerant clock repairers make a living by going from household to household on the fronteir, repairing wooden clocks.

1803  scientists finally have enough answers to the longstanding questions that had been supporting geocentrism, see 1616.  Geocentrism is refuted by all.

1803  nephew of Galvani, Giovanni Aldini, is “the corpse reanimator.”  He obtains the executed body of George Forster, invites a crowd to watch, applies Voltaic piles to various points of the body, and “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.”  "Witnesses were convinced the cadaver had come back to life. It punched the air with its fists, kicked out its legs, and violently arched its back in whole-body convulsions."  See Frankenstein 1818.

1803  Napoleon sells Louisiana to the U.S. to help fund his wars of aggressive conquest in Europe.  Louisiana is so distant that it was impossible to defend, and Napoleon was worried that the British might attack from across the border in Canada.  He decided that it was better to get what he could.  Napoleon sees U.S. as a long term rival to Britain.  The U.S. in possession of Louisiana is more powerful and a serious rival to Britain.

1804  Lewis and Clark start their exploration of the Louisiana Purchase from St. Louis.   St. Louis started in 1763 by Laclede and Chouteau (French), it becomes home for French leaving Illinois when Britain takes control east of the Mississippi.   Trade routes by Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers.  Irish and German immigrants come to St. Louis.   A cousin of Margaret (Thomas) Engelbrecht, Dr. J.M., about 2015, shows a valuable charter of the expedition on Antiques Roadshow.

1804  last northern state accepts limits on slavery;  some slaves & children of slaves continue in northern slavery until 1847

1804  Gay-Lussac rises to 13,120 ft in balloon & studies composition, temperature, pressure of air.  A quick ascent of more than 8000 feet brings on altitude sickness, including headache, so Gay-Lussac probably was handicapped while at altitude.  

1805   (continued from 1670)  Willhem de Wette advances Documentary Hypothesis.  “The application of the term mythology to certain narratives and opinions in the Bible need excite no surprise. The Jews had their mythology, as well as the Hindus, the Goths, and the Greeks. Symbols and myths are necessarily used, by rude people, to clothe abstract truths. It is evident that ancient Hebrews made use of them as a drapery of religious truth.”  He taught that Moses was primitive and without robust culture.  JE:  Perhaps this European snobbery was popular at the time.  It comes significantly before Darwin's biases.   Nevertheless,  Gleason Archer explains:  “This was the age in which Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was capturing the allegiance of the scholars and scientific world and the theory of development from primitive animism to sophisticated monotheism as set forth by Wellhausen and his followers fitted admirably into Hegelian dialecticism[…] and Darwinian evolutionism."    Continued at 1922.

1805 Fall     Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and the Corps of Discovery meet with Shoshone led by Chief Cameahwait in hope that they can bargain for horses, otherwise they have no way to offload their armory and supplies from boats and continue into the mountains (the region of the Continental Divide).  Sacagawea recognizes the chief as her brother and they emotionally reunite.  (Sacagawea had been kidnapped by another tribe years before.)  The bargain is made and the expedition continues.  Within months they pass to the Snake River but almost starve.    A secret part of the Lewis and Clark expedition is to satisfy Pres. Jefferson's interest in the large animals whose fossilized skeletons are receiving much press.  Jefferson believes that no species can become extinct;  he holds that this satisfies Scripture.  Jefferson hopes Lewis and Clark will come across giant, living animals.

1805  Young's double-slit experiment shows light diffraction and interference, establishing the wave nature of electromagnetic energy until the particle aspects take over in the early 1900s

1806  Davy electrolyzes sodium and potassium from molten salts, obtaining the constituent metals and halogens

1807  energy first used in technical writing

1808  Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institute's basement connects 800 Voltaic piles to two carbon filaments.  Touching the filaments, there is an incredible spark.  The audience is as stunned as they had been by Francis Hauksbee's glowing light from a rotating glass cylinder, which was static.  2016 BBC History of Electricity

1807  Hegel publishes Phenomenology of Spirit (or of Mind) deals with objects and subjects (subject is the self).      http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hegel/section2.rhtml The struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman inspired Marx’s account of how class struggle naturally arises from the exploitation of one social class by another, see 1843 in this timeline.    Austin's Topical History of Christianity p. 326 Hegel says the Absolute Spirit, Reason, is always in the process of coming to being but will sometime be complete.  Feuerbach, influenced by Hegel, will call all of Christianity an illusion, and is influential upon Marx.           1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1808  Dalton publishes New System of Chemical Philosophy  based on atoms.  They are indestructible, a given element's atoms are identical, compounds are combinations of atoms, chemical reactions are rearrangements of atoms.  Dalton uses ball-and-stick models for molecules, critic says it is a tissue of absurdities.

1809  Gauss publishes Theory of the motion of heavenly bodies moving about the sun in conic sections. The methods are still in use today, and only a few modifications have been necessary to adapt them for computers. Gauss's determination of Ceres's orbit makes him famous in academic circles worldwide, establishes his reputation in the scientific and mathematical communities, and wins him a position as director at the Gottingen Observatory.  Gauss and others compete to predict where Ceres will reappear after it is lost in the sun's glare.  Only 41 days of observations are available after Ceres' discovery, during which time Ceres moves only 9 degrees.  This is much more challenging than in the 1781 Uranus case.  Gauss calculates for 100 hours and uses a forerunner of the Fast Fourier Transform.  He uses his unpublished method of least squares to moderate observational errors.  His prediction is quite different than the others, and he turns out to be correct.

1810  world population 1 billion, North America 7 million  0 A.D. 200 million, 1000 A.D. 400 million, 1650 500 million, 1900 1.6 billion, 1930 2 billion, 1990 5 billion, 2000 6 billion

1811  Avogadro finds that different gases have equal number of particles per volume (same temp & pressure), though different masses

1811  Bell establishes that the nerves for each of the senses can be traced from specific areas of the brain to their end organs

1812  The German Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, publish Household Tales, folk tales told the way country folk tell them, without making asides to politics.  Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella. 

1812  Kensett establishes first U.S. cannery for oysters, meats, fruits and vegetables in New York.  Meat must be processed well above 212 deg. C to kill germs.

1812  hotelier Bell uses a small steamboat, the Comet, as a passenger ferry

1813  Shanks finds pi to 707 digits, a sufficient precision to indicate that pi is an irrational number (contains no repeating fragment), as are most square roots of integers

1814  Laplace writes of determinism:  An intellect knowing at any given moment all forces and positions of bodies in the universe could predict all the future.  Determinism and the German Positivists hold sway until physicists start paying attention to the statistics involved with Brownian motion, around 1900.  Modern chaos theory (1961, Lorenz) further discourages determinists.  See Clockwork Universe Theory at 1770 approx.    See 1927 Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

1814  http://mentalfloss.com/article/65005/beethoven-worlds-first-rock-star   (c) 2018 Mental Floss, Inc.   This critical review by JE pulls some thoughts from the Mental Floss web page and adds thoughts from KMFA Aug 23 4 A.M. Work Bench

    The French Revolution (see 1793 in this time line) sent gusts of revolutionary thought toward the other countries of Europe.  Vienna was crawling with spies...looking to suss out anti-aristocratic rebels. Since Beethoven seemed suspect, these spies followed him and eavesdropped on his conversations.  Vienna was the first modern police state.

    Beethoven was believed to be finished, musically.  But, with failing hearing, he worked for years on Symphony No. 9 in D minor. With it, he planned to give those spies reason to worry—not only would the piece be political, but he intended to play it for the largest audience possible, the common people.

    Beethoven had made a name for himself after Mozart's death.  Mozart had been the aristocracy’s most cherished entertainer. The nobles were desperate to find his replacement, and Beethoven, who improvised at the piano for royal soirées, quickly became regarded as one of Vienna’s most talented musicians—and Mozart’s heir.  But musicians were treated like cooks and maids.

    “He knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an eye remained dry, while many would break into loud sobs,” Carl Czerny wrote in Cocks’s Musical Miscellany.  So the nobility allowed Beethoven some leniency.  He was Romanticism’s posterboy.  But nobility in Paris were being guillotined.  Beethoven managed to stay mostly out of trouble.  Instrumental music, without lyrics, was safer from censors. 

    Symphony No. 9 was a hit in 1824, though nobility shunned it.  It marked a larger cultural sea change:  society revering artists and making them celebrities. In a way, Beethoven was the world’s first rock star.  The bigger, stronger modern piano emerged partly to accommodate his pieces. The first professional orchestras appeared in his wake.  Beethoven reversed the trend of ignoring deceased writer's compositions. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth with musicians from both sides of the divide, in East Berlin.

1814   birth of John Sinclair, an ancestor of John Engelbrecht's wife, in Barglass, Scotland. 

1815  Mt. Tambora in Indonesia erupts, worse than 1883 Krakatoa.  In the U.S., the year without a summer.  Crop failures.  Horses are too expensive to feed, bicycle invented as alternative to horse.

1815  Berzelius has three principles about organic chemistry.  1) Organic compounds cannot be made from inorganic.  2) A vital force is needed to produce organic compounds.

1815  marine chronometers are mass produced for longitude determination, 5000 qty to date.  Based on Harrison's lifelong work.  Earnshaw & Arnold carry forth mass production.  Naval officers commonly purchase their own.  Reduction of naval disasters due to lack of longitude.

1817 approx.  English Malthus, in his An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an enquiry into our Prospects respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it occasions, which was one of the revisions of his Essay, called for placing the poor in conditions in which they would fall sick and die.  This is quoted from New Oxford Review Sept 2015 p. 12 and is couched in a criticism of social Darwinism.  Considering that Malthus' essays were widely commented upon, controversial, and often misquoted, this attribution to Malthus of such an extreme measure is not necessarily his true opinion.

    Ap 2018 New Oxford Review  "Malthus lived in...times rife with unrealistic dreams of the perfectability of man...advances in medicine, public health, agriculture, stock breeding, city planning.

1818   Mary Shelley writes the first science fiction, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.  This may have been inspired by Aldini, see 1803.

1820   Buckland describes dinosaur skeletons in a scientific journal

1820  Royal Navy sends Bransfield to search south of Shetlands. He is the first to see the Antarctic Peninsula.  Note:  National Geographic Society not founded until 1888.

1820 (continuing from 1770 approx. in this timeline)   Using a razor, Thomas Jefferson cuts and pastes his arrangement of selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order.  The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth begins with an account of Jesus’s birth without references to angels, genealogy, or prophecy.  Miracles, references to the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and Jesus’ resurrection are also absent.  On-line as   the-jefferson-bible.pdf.  His goal was to "justify the character of Jesus against the fictions of his pseudo-followers" in order "to rescue his character."    1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.  Romans 6:23 The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus.

1820  Joseph Smith supposedly has his first vision.  He goes on to found the Latter Day Saints.  He unearths golden plates written in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics and translates them using an optical device.  The printed translation is the Book of Mormon.  Moroni the angel took back the plates when Smith was finished.  LDS says the Christian trinity is separate beings, and they worship the three separate beings.  All three are, or were at one time flesh-and-blood beings.  Jesus was the son of Mary and God, and Mary didn't become pregnant while remaining a virgin.  Lucifer is the brother of Jesus, also by the conventional means.  Every person, even pagans, shares in the unconditional redemption.  The most desirable spiritual attainment, exaltation, entails baptism for the dead (for ancestors), which confers exaltation for them.  Works are important to LDS. 

1820  Westward movement of American frontier, western states had been Kentucky and Tennessee in 1800, now add Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

1820  Ampere finds that parallel wires experience mutual force when currents flow in them (magnetic attraction or repulsion).  Ampere is one of the fathers of electromagnetism.

1800s sometime     Wikipedia     the quantum world      Degrees of freedom are "frozen out." "Decrease of heat capacity when things get really cold was among the first signs to physicists of the 19th century that classical physics was incorrect." Equipartition did not predict black-body radiation, the ultraviolet catastrophe. Max Planck.

Physics Time Line 1821-1899

Physics Time Line 1900-present (actually, 1900 to 1990)       To find 1991 to 2021, look at the bottom of 1900 to 1990 for the link.

Physics Time Line Jan20 2021:

sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-jan20-2021 

Summary of web addresses

John Engelbrecht's unregistered-copyrighted © 2019  Physics Time Line is at the following four web pages. 

Please read the following three web pages on the topics of intolerance-in-academia, morals-shown-in-physics-timeline, and solzhenitsyn-addresses-harvard, the last of which addresses post-modernism thirteen years before the breakup of USSR.

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/physics-time-line-1990-present/intolerance-in-academia

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/morals-shown-in-physics-timeline

https://sites.google.com/site/solderandcircuits/home/more-circuit-design/physics-timeline/physics-time-line-1900-present/solzhenitsyn-addresses-harvard      

The study of measuring things is metrology.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology is an important organization.  There are some jobs in metrology.  Metrology is not meteorology.