Francis Bacon
Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the great philosophers of the Scientific Revolution. His thoughts on logic and ethics in science and his ideas on the cooperation and interaction of the various fields of science, presented in his work Novum Organum, have remained influential in the scientific world to this day.
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli
Borelli (1608-1679) was the foremost thinker of the era on human mechanics. His 1680 work, On the Motion of Animals, is widely recognized as the greatest early triumph of the application of mechanics to the human organism.
Robert Boyle
Boyle (1627-1691), a successful physicist at Oxford college, worked with his colleague Robert Hooke to discern the properties of the air, experimenting with air pressure and the composition of the atmosphere. Boyle proved that only a part of the air is used in respiration and combustion, and is thus credited with the discovery of oxygen. Boyle's further work touched on the beginnings of the study of matter on the atomic scale.
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was a great astronomical observer, and made accurate and long-term records of his observations, from which he derived his view of the structure of the solar system, in which the moon and sun orbited the Earth and the remaining planets orbited the sun. While incorrect, his scheme was as viable by the knowledge of the time as was that of Nicolas Copernicus.
Otto Brunfels
A German, in 1530 Brunfels (1488-1534) was the first to produce a major work on plants. However, he fell victim to a blunder made by many botanists of the time. In reverence for the ancients, whose botanical studies were widely revered, in his study he attempted to compare his findings to those of the Greeks and Romans. The differences in plant life produced by the variation in geography meant that comparison was futile, and confusion resulted in the field of botany, clouding the work of many of Brunfels' immediate followers.
Giordano Bruno
A renegade Italian monk, Bruno (1548-1600) published three works--The Ash-Wednesday Supper,On Cause, Principle, and Unity, and On the Infinite Universe and its Worlds--in which he laid out his philosophy that the universe was of infinite size, and that the Earth, sun, and planets were all moving constantly within it, and were by no means located at its center.
Nicolas Copernicus
Copernicus (1473-1543) was an avid student of astronomy, and in 1543 published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. In this treatise, he presented the heliocentric theory, which rested on the revolutionary notion that the Earth orbited the sun.
Rene Descartes
Descartes (1596-1650) was one of the greatest minds of the Scientific Revolution. The inventor of deductive reasoning, Descartes was a failure as a practical scientist, but a success as a mathematician, uniting number and form in his work Geometry, which described how the motion of a point could be mapped graphically by comparing its position to planes of reference.
Leonard Fuchs
A Botanist of the sixteenth century, Fuchs (1501-1566) produced a guide to collecting medical plants that is considered a landmark in the history of natural observation. His woodcut prints are the most beautiful and accurate of the period.
Galen
An ancient Greek physician, Galen's (129-199) work was the centerpiece of traditional biology and anatomy that had lasted through the Middle Ages.
Galileo Galilei
Galileo (1564-1642) was the most successful scientist of the Scientific Revolution, save only Isaac Newton. He studied physics, specifically the laws of gravity and motion, and invented the telescope and microscope. Galileo eventually combined his laws of physics with the observations he made with his telescope to defend the heliocentric Copernican view of the universe and refute the Aristotelian system in his 1630 masterwork, Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World. Upon its publication, he was censored by the Catholic Church and sentenced to house arrest in 1633, where he remained until his death in 1642. Read the SparkNote on Galileo.
Samuel Hartlib
Hartlib (1600-1662), a London scientist and socialite, first conceived of the creation of the Royal Society of London, and was instrumental in its eventual founding in 1662.
William Harvey
Through dissection, Harvey (1578-1657) was the first to demonstrate that the circulation of blood through the human body is continuous, rather than consisting of different types circulating through the veins and arteries, as had been previously assumed by the ancient Greek physician, Galen.
