The Scientific Revolution

1543 O.S. – 1687 O.S.58 items

early modernscience
A flea under the microscope, engraved for Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
A flea under the microscope, engraved for Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

From Copernicus to Newton’s Principia

In 1543 a dying canon in Frombork put the Sun at the centre of the planets. In 1687 an Englishman showed that one law of gravity moves both an apple and the Moon. In between, Europeans turned telescopes and microscopes on the world, found that the blood circulates and that air has weight, put Galileo on trial, and founded the first scientific societies and journals.

Two calendars side by side

Everything before October 1582 is dated in the Julian calendar, which all of Europe used. Pope Gregory XIII then dropped ten days, and Catholic Europe jumped from Thursday 4 October to Friday 15 October 1582. Protestant England would not follow for 170 years, so from then on events in Italy, France and the Low Countries are in the Gregorian calendar, and events in England, Scotland and Denmark are in the Julian, as the people who lived them wrote them.

Galileo died on 8 January 1642 in Arcetri and Newton was born on 25 December 1642 at Woolsthorpe, which is why England says Newton was born the year Galileo died. On one axis the gap shows: Newton’s birthday was 4 January 1643 in Florence, a year after Galileo’s death.

England also began its year on Lady Day, 25 March, so Charles I lost his head on “30 January 1648/9”. Those dates are entered as the English wrote them, with the year starting in March, and Timescrolly places them in the right year.

How it is laid out

  • Periods: Tycho’s Uraniborg, Kepler in Prague, Galileo’s years in Padua and Florence, the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil Wars and Newton’s plague years.

  • Threads to filter by: planets, sky, instruments, physics, medicine, religion, academies, calendar and women.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe … It is written in the language of mathematics. — Galileo, The Assayer (1623)

Items

  1. Copernicus to the telescope

    ≈ 66 years

  2. Copernicus dies at Frombork

    Cathedral Hill, Frombork

  3. Copernicus’s De revolutionibus is printed

  4. Vesalius’s Fabrica

  5. Tycho Brahe sees a new star

    Herrevad Abbey, Scania

  6. Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg

    ≈ 20 years, 10 months · Uraniborg, island of Hven

  7. The Great Comet of 1577

    Island of Hven

  8. Pope Gregory XIII signs the calendar bull

    Villa Mondragone, Frascati

  9. Last day of the Julian calendar in Catholic Europe

  10. First day of the Gregorian calendar

  11. Galileo at Padua

    ≈ 17 years, 9 months · Padua

  12. Kepler in Prague

    ≈ 12 years, 4 months · Prague

  13. Giordano Bruno burned in Rome

    Campo de’ Fiori, Rome

  14. Gilbert’s De Magnete

  15. Tycho Brahe dies in Prague

    Prague

  16. Kepler’s supernova

    Prague

  17. Lipperhey asks for a patent on the telescope

    Binnenhof, The Hague

  18. Kepler’s Astronomia Nova

  19. Thomas Harriot draws the Moon through a telescope

    Syon House, Isleworth

  20. Galileo shows Venice his spyglass

    Campanile di San Marco, Venice

  21. Galileo finds the moons of Jupiter

    Padua

  22. Sidereus Nuncius

  23. Galileo in Florence and Arcetri

    ≈ 31 years · Florence

  24. Napier’s logarithms

  25. Rome suspends Copernicus

    Rome

  26. The Thirty Years’ War

    ≈ 30 years, 5 months

  27. Kepler’s third law

  28. Bacon’s Novum Organum

  29. Harvey shows the blood circulates

  30. Galileo’s Dialogue

    Florence

  31. Galileo in Rome for his trial

    4 months, 23 days · Rome

  32. Galileo’s first interrogation

    Palace of the Holy Office, Rome

  33. Galileo abjures

    Convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome

  34. Descartes’s Discourse on Method

  35. Galileo’s Two New Sciences, printed in Leiden

    Leiden

  36. Horrocks watches Venus cross the Sun

    Much Hoole, Lancashire

  37. Galileo dies at Arcetri

    Villa Il Gioiello, Arcetri

  38. The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum

    ≈ 17 years, 9 months

  39. Isaac Newton is born

    Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire

  40. Torricelli’s ocean of air

    Florence

  41. The Puy de Dôme experiment

    Summit of the Puy de Dôme

  42. Charles I is executed

    Banqueting House, Whitehall

  43. Maria Cunitz’s Urania Propitia

  44. The Royal Society is founded

    Gresham College, Bishopsgate

  45. Boyle’s law

    Boyle’s lodgings, High Street, Oxford

  46. Hooke’s Micrographia

  47. The first Philosophical Transactions

  48. Newton’s plague years at Woolsthorpe

    ≈ 1 year, 8 months · Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire

  49. Margaret Cavendish visits the Royal Society

    Arundel House, Strand

  50. Newton’s theory of light and colours

    Arundel House, Strand

  51. The Royal Observatory is begun at Greenwich

    Flamsteed House, Greenwich

  52. “The shoulders of Giants”

    Trinity College, Cambridge

  53. Leeuwenhoek’s little animals

    Delft

  54. Rømer times the speed of light

    Paris Observatory

  55. Halley watches the comet of 1682

    Islington

  56. A wager over the planets

  57. Halley visits Newton in Cambridge

    Trinity College, Cambridge

  58. Newton’s Principia is published