Scientific Revolution Timeline

Prior thinkers, including the early-14th-century nominalist philosopher William of Ockham, had begun the intellectual movement toward empiricism that would later underpin the Scientific Revolution.

Image source: William of Ockham

In the 16th century, surgeon Ambroise Paré was a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds.

Image source: Ambroise Paré

The Scientific Revolution is frequently said to have begun in 1543 with the printing of De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius, alongside Copernicus's De Revolutionibus published the same year.

Image source: De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem

Practical attempts to improve the refining of ores and their extraction to smelt metals were an important source of information for early chemists in the 16th century, among them Georgius Agricola, who published his great work De re metallica in 1556.

Image source: De re metallica

William Gilbert's book on magnetism, De Magnete, was written in 1600 and is one of the finest examples of inductive philosophy ever presented to the world; Gilbert is regarded by some as the father of electricity and magnetism.

Image source: De Magnete

Francis Bacon's Novum Organum was published in 1620, arguing that man is 'the minister and interpreter of nature,' that knowledge and human power are synonymous, and that nature can only be commanded by obeying her.

Image source: Novum Organum

William Harvey published De Motu Cordis in 1628, demonstrating the circulation of the blood and revolutionizing physiology.

Image source: Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek constructed powerful single lens microscopes and made extensive observations that he published around 1660, paving the way for the science of microbiology.

Image source: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Robert Boyle presented Boyle's law in 1662: the law describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system.

Image source: Boyle's law

In 1675 Boyle stated that electric attraction and repulsion can act across a vacuum, an early contribution to the study of electricity.

Image source: Robert Boyle

An influential formulation of empiricism was John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), in which he maintained that the only true knowledge accessible to the human mind was that which was based on experience.

Image source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

In 1729 Stephen Gray demonstrated that electricity could be 'transmitted' through metal filaments, extending earlier findings that electric attraction and repulsion can act across a vacuum.

Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia was the basis for most maps made in Renaissance Europe in the 15th century. Since the Americas were completely absent from Ptolemy's maps, the European encounter with the Americas beginning at the end of the 15th century was a complete surprise.

Image source: Geography (Ptolemy)

By the 16th century, the Aristotelian framework dominated Europe's intellectual landscape, though historians like James Hannam argue it was already fading and partly discredited. The Scientific Revolution would be a decisive rupture with Renaissance Aristotelianism, but still a break with an existing tradition, not a creation from nothing.

Image source: Aristotelianism

The word 'revolution' has been used to describe scientific upheaval since at least the 18th century. In 1747, the French mathematician Alexis Clairaut applied it to Isaac Newton.

Image source: Alexis Clairaut

Nicolaus Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), printed in 1543, is often cited as the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, proposing a heliocentric model of the cosmos.

Image source: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

On a fall evening in 1572, just after sunset, a 25-year-old Danish nobleman named Tycho Brahe observed a new star. The SN 1572 supernova has been suggested as an alternative starting date for the Scientific Revolution, since it challenged the Aristotelian notion of an unchanging heavens.

Image source: SN 1572

Brahe recorded the supernova's position and changing brightness over several months and then published his observations in De Nova Stella in 1573.

Image source: Tycho Brahe

In 1591, François Viète published In Artem Analyticem Isagoge, which gave the first symbolic notation of parameters in algebra, advancing mathematical formalization.

Image source: François Viète

In 1604 Johannes Kepler published Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy), a foundational work in optics.

Image source: Johannes Kepler

Galileo was one of the first scientists to use the newly invented telescope for his astronomical observations in 1609, transforming humanity's view of the heavens.

Image source: Galileo Galilei

Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), published in Venice in 1610, reported his telescopic discoveries, although printers' blunders caused his lunar surface images to mistakenly appear back to front. The development of engraved metal plates allowed accurate visual information to be made permanent.

Image source: Sidereus Nuncius

Willebrord Snellius found the mathematical law of refraction, now known as Snell's law, in 1621.

Image source: Snell's law

In 1637, René Descartes greatly improved the scope and formalization of algebra in La Géométrie.

Image source: La Géométrie

In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles.

Image source: Isaac Newton

In 1679, Newton began to consider gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. This followed stimulation by a brief exchange of letters in 1679–80 with Hooke, and his interest received further stimulus by the appearance of a comet in the winter of 1680–81, on which he corresponded with John Flamsteed.

Newton communicated his results to Edmond Halley and to the Royal Society in De motu corporum in gyrum in 1684, laying groundwork for the Principia.

Image source: De motu corporum in gyrum

The Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published on 5 July 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Halley. It culminated the Scientific Revolution: Newton's laws of motion became the solid foundation of mechanics, and his law of universal gravitation combined terrestrial and celestial mechanics into one great system dominating scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries.

Image source: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Whereas Newton vehemently denied gravity was an inherent power of matter, his collaborator Roger Cotes made gravity also an inherent power of matter, as set out in his famous preface to the Principia's 1713 second edition which he edited, contradicting Newton. Newton firmly rejected such criticisms in a concluding General Scholium, writing that it was enough that the phenomena implied gravitational attraction without framing hypotheses about its cause.

Image source: Roger Cotes

On 28 November 1660, the '1660 committee of 12' announced the formation of a College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning. A royal charter signed on 15 July 1662 created the Royal Society of London, with Lord Brouncker as its first president.

Image source: Royal Society

A second royal charter was signed on 23 April 1663, naming the society 'the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge'; Robert Hooke was appointed as curator of experiments in November.

The Royal Society began publication of Philosophical Transactions in 1665, the oldest and longest-running scientific journal in the world, which established the important principles of scientific priority and peer review.

Image source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

The French established the Academy of Sciences in 1666. Its rules were set down in 1699 by King Louis XIV, when it received the name of 'Royal Academy of Sciences' and was installed in the Louvre in Paris.

Image source: French Academy of Sciences