TABLE OF CONTENTS The work of Isaac Newton concluded the scientific revolution that began in large part in A.D. 1549 when Nicholaus Copernicus first argued that the Earth is not stationary at the center of the Universe but rotates on its axis once a day and orbits the Sun once a year, along with the other planets. The revolution in science extended over the work of numerous "giants," as Newton called them Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and many others resulting, by Newton's death in 1724, in the basis for the understanding of the physical world that we have today, what we call modern physics.
Many of the characteristics of modern physics that were established during the scientific revolution actually derived from the work of ancient thinkers, especially the work of the Ancient Greeks. This was because the Greeks were the first influential thinkers to seek explanations of natural events in terms of rational causes, rather than in the actions of supernatural beings. This meant that, for the first time, people regarded nature as accessible to human inquiry and study and governed by humanly understandable, rational principles. Truly scientific research was now possible.
As established by the scientific revolution, scientific research consists of the gathering of data through active experimentation and testing, not just passive observation or no observation at all. Galileo called experimental inquiry the "interrogation" of nature. The experimental evidence and closely related hypotheses are then joined together through rational processes and further experimental testing into a theory about the...
