The topic of the third HCJ lecture was about science. Science is something that I found quite interesting at school, mainly because in Year 8, I had a great teacher. It then sort of fell apart because of two of the teachers that I had for GCSE...you know who your are.
Enough reminiscing and on with the lecture notes.
Ptolemy: His theory was that the Earth is the centre of the universe and everything else revolves around it.
Francis Bacon: Born 1561. He was unfortunate enough to be taught things in lectures that had been taught 100 years before, he rejected the Aristotelian ideas and also condemned the mixing of science and religion. Mixing the two resulted in an obsession with word play and not action - not so different from modern day politics, eh Mr Cameron?
Arguably Bacon's finest work was his book 'The New Organon'. This book directly attacked Aristotle and his theories - especially logic and deduction. The book covered 4 major themes:
1: 'Knowledge is power'.
2: Separate science and religion.
3: Induction - this is a method of acquiring knowledge by reasoning and observation.
4: Science is dynamic.
Mr Bacon died in 1626 from Pneumonia - not that unusual in those days I assume. But he got Pneumonia from stuffing a chicken full of snow to try and see if it would preserve the meat. (Not a comical a death as Empedocles' though!).
Locke (again): He believed that knowledge comes from experience, he was against innateness (Plato's 'thing'). He also thought that God had given mankind the ability to discover knowledge.
Both Bacon and Locke believed that knowledge comes from experience.
Copernicus: He devised a system in which the sun was at the centre of the universe (for some people 'The Sun' is at the centre of their universe...).
Kepler: He used Copernicus' ideas and tried to prove it with experiments. He wrote the book 'The Harmony of the World', in which he discovered a new theory about planetary motion.
Galileo: (He was born on the day of Michelangelo's death, the day of Galileo's death is important because Newton was born on that day. This means that his life links the renaissance to the age of science.)
He was influenced by Kepler's ideas and work.
He perfected an new telescope (the telescope was originally a Dutch invention, it wasn't very good!) Galileo's telescope was considered a true revelation because astronomers could look deep into space - something they were unable to do before. As a result, the power of observation took precedence in science. Whilst using his telescope, he observed these things:
1: Mountains and craters on the moon.
2: The phases of Venus.
3: The Milky Way.
4: A number of heavenly objects and also saw the moons of Jupiter.
After a few years though, people had had enough of Galileo's ramblings and was brought before the Inquisition. He (like many others) was shown some of the torture instruments - he decided that he had no belief and was kept under house arrest under he died.
And finally...Isaac Newton: He wrote 'Principia' - this was a mathematical demonstration of Kepler's and Copernicus' ideas.
He defined 'The Clockwork Universe' - he said that the world was ordered and 'knowable'.
After the work of Newton, Aristotelian ideas were discredited and undermined (especially his physics).
TB 2011
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