When most people think about the Scientific Revolution, Isaac Newton and his famed affinity for apples springs immediately to mind. This is definitely warranted – Newton was one of the most prolific and successful scientists of his day. Newton lived towards the end of the Scientific Revolution; so naturally, he was very much immersed in the past findings of the many scientists who had lived and worked before him. In particular, he was inspired by the work of Johannes Kepler and his theory of elliptical planetary motion. Over the course of his career, Newton made numerous new discoveries in the field of astronomy while also pioneering the beginnings of physics. He is best known for his discovery of gravity, which he uncovered during his investigation into Kepler’s past planetary research. As Newton realized, every single object in the entire universe, including the planets, were all affected by gravity, a powerful force which pulled and pushed things together in mathematically perfect order.

Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, author, and lawyer, was a key part of the Scientific Revolution. Bacon was nearly frenetic in his interests; he was involved in almost every possible field, from politics to literature to scientific investigation. Today, he is best known because of his status as the so-called “father of empiricism.” Empiricism is the belief that observation and experimentation are crucial to human understanding; without personal observation, Bacon argued, any explanations or theories were fatally flawed and unacceptable. According to this theory, any scientist who wished to investigate the natural world should first spend a very long time observing the topic of his research, using the powers of his own five senses. Only through detailed personal study, Bacon believed, could any sort of scientific truth be discovered. (For this reason, he was a vigorous champion of Isaac Newton.) In keeping with this attitude, he ridiculed any scientist who hadn’t personally observed or studied natural phenomena.

The scientific principle of deduction was devised by Rene Descartes, one of the Scientific Revolution’s most lauded men. Although he is today most famous for his invention of analytic geometry, in his own time Descartes was best known for his principle of deduction. Deduction is the belief that all intellectual reasoning (whether scientific or humanistic in nature) must first begin with a basic, central idea, which would then guide the thinker, in logical succession, to ever more specific and certain facts. Along with the theory of deduction, Descartes developed the scientific method (a methodology for conducting scientific research) whose emphasis on the importance of a hypothesis perfectly supports deductive reasoning. He was especially in favor of quiet, introspective examination, which he believed would reveal answers about the universe to the sufficiently deductive and internalized mind. While quite popular at the time, Descartes’s deductive reasoning gradually fell out of favor and was eclipsed by Francis Bacon’s principle of empiricism.

For many people, the 1633 trial of Galileo Galilei by the highest officials of the Catholic Church is the supreme epitome of conflict and incompatibility between organized religion and modern science. For many years prior to his trial, Galileo had been a widely known proponent of Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism, which clearly contradicted Scriptural teachings about the creation of the natural world. Yet for most of his life, Galileo had been left alone by the Catholic Church, which was arguably powerful enough to have stopped him from publicly speaking or publishing any time it chose. The Church actually took action first against Copernicus; in 1616, the Catholic Inquisition banned further publication and reading of his work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Quite naturally, Galileo disagreed with this prohibition and he continued to serve as an advocate for heliocentrism. Events finally converged in 1633, when Galileo was arrested and accused of promoting Copernicanism and possibly also of possessing the astronomer’s banned works. Galileo was tried before a Church court, staffed by the highest Catholic officials (including the Pope). He was found guilty, forced to publicly revoke his support for Copernicus, and had to spend the remaining nine years of his life living under house arrest in Florence. Centuries later, in 1992, the Catholic Church issued a formal apology to Galileo and vindicated his beliefs and his courage.

The printing press was invented, in Europe, by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. The invention of the printing press allowed for pamphlets and essays to be widely produced for the first time in European history. This facilitated the spread of ideas in Europe and allowed for the rapid spread of the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century.

The feudal system, in both Europe and Japan, was built on the premise that certain individuals are more skilled and have better training in weapons than others.  Archery and swordsmanship were both difficult skills, which had to be mastered over a period of years. Those skilled individuals were able to gain power for themselves by agreeing to fight on behalf of landowners and in defense of serfs living on the land. However, the introduction of firearms changed this arrangement. Suddenly anyone with access to a gun could shoot and kill with very little training. This contributed to the decline of the feudal system in Europe, and, when guns were introduced to Japanese society, threatened to disrupt the feudal system in Japan.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is most often remembered for his pioneering work in microbiology. He made dramatic refinements to the technology of microscopes, allowing them to magnify to much greater extremes. He made many of the first human observations of different types of cells.

The Three Laws of Motion were first proposed by Isaac Newton. The Three Laws of Motion (which Newton published in the late seventeenth century) revolutionized, some might say invented, the area of science known as physics, and established Newton as one of the leading scientific figures in human history.

Gerardus Mercator was a “cartographer” (mapmaker) in the sixteenth century. He made several adjustments to the way maps are made that continue to persist to this day and which made navigation much easier during his own time period.

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century changed a great deal about European society. For the first time ideas could be spread quickly around the continent. It also led to a marked rise in European literacy rates as more reading material begat more consumers.