The Scientific Revolution

Foreword.- Preface.- List of Illustrations.- PART ONE: INTRODUCTION: THE EVOLUTION AND IMPACT OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION.- Why Did the Scientific Revolution Happen?.- Aristotle Ptolemy, and their Early Modern Defenders.- Exploration and Technical Innovation.- The Emergence of the Scientific Revolution.- The New Science.- The Mechanical Philosophy.- Newtonian Science.- Reconciling, Science, Religion, and Magic.- Spreading the Scientific Revolution.- Conclusion: The Long Road to Acceptance.- PART TWO: THE DOCUMENTS.- Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, 1543.- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605.- Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, 1620.- Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, 1610.- William Harvey, On The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In Animals, 1628.- René Descartes, Discourse on Method, 1637.- Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, 1660.- Robert Boyle, A Free-Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686.- Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, Of the Formation of the Teeth in Several Animals; the Structure of the Human Teeth Explained, 1683.- Isaac Newton, Letter to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1672.- Isaac Newton, Selections from Principia, 1687 .- Isaac Newton, Thirty-first Query to the Opticks, 1718.- Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discovered, 1698.- Maria Sibylla Merian, Letter of 1702.- Maria Sibylla Merian, Butterfly, Hawk-moth, Caterpillar Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1713-14.- Jean Desaguliers, Physico-Mechanical Lectures, 1717.- Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made in Philadelphia in America, 1751.- Appendixes.- A Chronology of the Scientific Revolution (1514-1752).- Questions for Consideration.- Selected Bibliography.- Index.

MARGARET C. JACOB (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. She has published widely on science, religion, the Enlightenment, freemasonry, and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Her first book, The Newtonians and the English Revolution (1976), won the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her most recent monograph is Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (2006).