What was the Scientific Revolution?
➡ Directions: Read the text, highlight important parts, then answer the question that follows.
The Scientific Revolution was a period of time from the 1500s through the 1700s in which scholars started to question their beliefs about the world and base their conclusions on observation and reason rather than spiritual belief or what organizations like the Catholic Church told them. Scholars who studied the natural world were often called “natural philosophers” during the Scientific Revolution. The term “scientist” was not used until the mid-1800s.

Scholars questioned whether the Earth or Sun was at the center of the solar system, why things fall down instead up, how the human body works, and many other topics in astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. To guide them in their discoveries, scholars followed a new process called the scientific method which emphasized the importance of experimentation, observation, evidence, and working with other scientists to confirm their results. The rebirth of the European economy, the start of more universities around the continent where researchers could work, and use of the printing press to circulate new ideas created a community of scholars who built on one another’s achievements to gain a better understanding of the world and push innovation forward.

Like the artists in the Renaissance, scholars during the Scientific Revolution owed the foundation of their work to Greek, Roman, and Muslim scholars that came before them. Trade between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, and Byzantine scholars who left Constantinople for Italy after the Ottoman Empire conquered it in 1453, led to the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts that had been kept in the Middle East during the chaotic European Middle Ages. In addition, Muslim scholars made grea t strides in science and their ideas were shared with Europeans and contributed to the discoveries made during the Scientific Revolution.

The Scientific Revolution changed the way that people look at the world and how one finds “truth” and provided later scientists with the tools they needed to make advances in technology that shaped the rest of global history.
Q1. When was the Scientific Revolution?

Q2. What changes resulted from the Scientific Revolution?
Q3. What topics did scholars investigate during the Scientific Revolution?

Q4. Where did the ideas that influenced the Scientific Revolution come from?