Page 369 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1670 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

At its best, Greek natural phi- Europe in the era of the sci-
losophy tried to capture not just entific revolution certainly fits
this or that aspect of reality, but this model. Medieval European
reality’s distilled essence. This societies showed a remarkable
project is most apparent in openness to new ideas and an
Greek mathematics and in exploratory spirit that was simi-
Plato’s conviction that it is pos- lar to that of classical Greece.By
sible to attain knowledge of a the late medieval ages, Euro-
perfect real world beneath the pean contacts reached from
imperfections of the existing Greenland in the west to China
world. Greek philosophers were in the east. Then, as European
particularly interested in the seafarers established close links
U.S. President Warren G. Harding
testing of new ideas, a trait that with Southeast Asia in the east
escorts Madame Curie down the steps
is perhaps inevitable in societies and the Americas in the west,
of the White House in the 1920s.
faced with a sudden influx of Europe suddenly found itself at
new forms of knowledge. The the center of the first global
rigor with which ideas were network of informational ex-
tested is apparent in the dialogues of Socrates, in which changes.The unification of the world in the sixteenth cen-
ideas are repeatedly subjected to Socrates’ corrosive logic tury constituted the most revolutionary extension of
(in an ancient anticipation of the notion of falsification), commercial and intellectual exchange networks in the
with only the most powerful surviving. Many other soci- entire history of humanity. Ideas about navigation and
eties developed sophisticated methods of mathematical astronomy, about new types of human societies and new
calculation and astronomical observation, and some, gods, about exotic crops and animal species, began to be
such as Song China (960–1279), developed metallurgi- exchanged on an unprecedented scale. Because Europe
cal, hydraulic, and financial technologies that were unsur- suddenly found itself at the center of these huge and var-
passed until the twentieth century. But few showed as ied information networks, it was the first region of the
much openness to new ideas or as much interest in the world to face the task of integrating information on a
testing of new ideas and theories as the Greeks. global scale into coherent knowledge systems. In the six-
Other societies have responded in similar ways to the teenth century, European philosophers struggled to make
exposure to new and more varied ideas. Perhaps sense of the torrent of new information that descended
Mesopotamia and Egypt, both with relatively easy access upon them, much of which undermined existing certain-
to Africa, India and the Mediterranean, count as early pio- ties. Like the Greeks, European thinkers faced the challenge
neers of scientific ideas for similar reasons. And perhaps of sorting the ephemeral from the durable, and to do that
it is the extensive contacts of medieval Islam that explain they had to devise new methods of observing and testing
the fundamental role of Islam both in exchanging ideas information and theories. It was this project that yielded
(such as the mathematical concept of zero) between the observational and experimental techniques later
India and the Mediterranean worlds and in preserving regarded as the essence of scientific method.
and developing the insights of Greek and Hellenic sci- Thinkers in the era of the scientific revolution not only
ence. Even in the Americas, it may have been the size of developed new ways of studying the world, they also cre-
Mesoamerican populations and their exposure to many ated a new vision of the universe. The new vision was
different regional cultures that led to the development of based on the work of three astronomers: Nicholas Coper-
sophisticated calendrical systems from perhaps as early as nicus (1473–1543), Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), and
the second millennium BCE. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Copernicus was the first