50 Fun Facts About Scientific Revolution

Which planet did Galileo find circled by four moons in 1610, proof that not everything orbits Earth?

Jupiter's four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are still called the Galilean moons. Many scholars at first refused to believe that anything could circle another planet.

After Galileo was found vehemently suspect of heresy in 1633, how did he spend the rest of his life?

Under house arrest at his villa near Florence, Galileo still wrote Two New Sciences, a major reason Albert Einstein later called him the father of modern physics.

What closed Cambridge University in 1665, sending Isaac Newton home for two highly productive years?

The plague, then raging in London, shut the university as a precaution. At home in Woolsthorpe, Newton developed his first ideas on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation.

Which line did René Descartes publish in Discourse on the Method as the one truth beyond doubt?

"I think, therefore I am" first appeared in French, as "Je pense, donc je suis", so that it could reach more readers than Latin allowed. The Latin cogito, ergo sum followed in 1644.

Isaac Newton told Robert Hooke in 1675 that he saw further by standing on the shoulders of what?

Giants were already proverbial: the poet George Herbert had recorded the saying that a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.

What did Isaac Newton use in the 1660s to show that white light is a mixture of colors?

A glass prism spread sunlight into a band of colors that Newton named the spectrum. He then used a lens and a second prism to blend the colors back into white light.

Copernicus, who put the Sun at the center of the heavens, was born in which present-day country?

Poland's city of Toruń was his birthplace, though his parents spoke German. Legend says the final printed pages of his great book reached him on the very day he died.

Which Greek thinker's rule that heavy objects fall faster than light ones did Galileo help overturn?

Aristotle had taught that objects fall faster in direct proportion to their weight. Galileo argued instead that, with no air to resist them, all bodies would drop at the same speed.

Which secretive pursuit fills about a million words of the papers Isaac Newton never published?

Alchemy drew Newton into a hunt for the philosopher's stone, said to turn base metals into gold. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought many of the papers, called him the last of the magicians.

What did the astronomer Tycho Brahe lose in a 1566 sword duel and replace with metal for life?

Part of his nose was sliced off by a cousin after a drunken quarrel over who was the better mathematician. Tests on his exhumed remains in 2012 showed the replacement was brass, not the silver and gold of legend.

Which English statesman argued in Novum Organum that knowledge must be built from observation?

Francis Bacon, who rose to be Lord Chancellor of England, has been called the father of empiricism. One old account says he caught a fatal chill while stuffing a hen with snow to test whether cold preserved meat.

Which German mathematician fought Isaac Newton in a bitter dispute over who first invented calculus?

Gottfried Leibniz published his calculus first, and Newton's supporters accused him of plagiarism. His notation was judged the more convenient, and British mathematicians finally adopted it after 1820.

What shape did Kepler find for planetary orbits after some forty failed attempts with Mars data?

Ellipses, with the Sun at one focus, became his first law of planetary motion. He had at first dismissed the shape as too simple for earlier astronomers to have overlooked.

Which astronomer paid to print Newton's Principia after the Royal Society overspent on a fish book?

Edmond Halley, the society's clerk and later famous for his comet, footed the bill himself. He was then told the society could no longer afford his promised salary of £50 a year.

Which Brussels-born anatomist corrected Galen in a 1543 book based on his own human dissections?

Andreas Vesalius found that Galen had cut open only animals, chiefly Barbary macaques, because ancient Rome did not allow human dissection. His illustrated Fabrica ran to seven books.

Which English physician showed in 1628 that the heart pumps blood around the body in a circuit?

William Harvey served as physician to both James I and Charles I. He estimated how much blood the heart expels with each beat, challenging the old view that the liver was the source of the blood in the veins.

What word did Robert Hooke coin in Micrographia for the tiny compartments he saw in a slice of cork?

Cell was Hooke's word for the pores of cork, which he wrote were much like a honeycomb. Samuel Pepys called Micrographia the most ingenious book he had ever read.

Which Dutch draper, using tiny lenses he made himself, became the first person to observe bacteria?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek kept a draper's shop in Delft and never wrote a book. He reported his discoveries in rambling letters to the Royal Society in London, which published many of them.

René Descartes died in which country, where a queen had him give lessons at five in the morning?

Sweden's Queen Christina had invited him to Stockholm and took her lessons before dawn in a cold, drafty castle. He is generally said to have died of pneumonia there in February 1650.

Which Catholic tribunal tried Galileo in 1633 for defending the view that Earth circles the Sun?

The Roman Inquisition had already condemned the Sun-centered theory in 1616. Galileo's 1632 Dialogue, which put the pope's own arguments in the mouth of a simpleton named Simplicio, brought him before it.

Which ancient astronomer wrote the Almagest, the Earth-centered guide trusted for over 1,200 years?

Ptolemy wrote it in the second century as the Mathematical Treatise. Its familiar name comes through Arabic from megiste, the Greek word for greatest.

Which French teenager began building a mechanical calculator in 1642 to ease his father's tax work?

Blaise Pascal was 18 when he started, and he built some 50 prototypes before showing the machine to the public in 1645. It became known as the Pascaline.

Which instrument did Evangelista Torricelli invent in 1643 using a tube of mercury in a basin?

The barometer showed that the weight of the air can hold up a column of mercury about 76 centimeters tall. The pressure unit called the torr is named after its inventor.

Which Irish-born chemist gives his name to a law linking the pressure and volume of a gas?

Robert Boyle was born at Lismore Castle, the fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork. His book The Sceptical Chymist helped earn him a reputation as the first modern chemist.

Isaac Newton was born on which holiday in 1642, by the calendar England was then using?

Christmas Day 1642 on England's old Julian calendar is 4 January 1643 on the modern one. His father, also named Isaac, had died three months before he was born.

Which relative did Kepler defend in court when she was accused of witchcraft in Württemberg?

His mother, Katharina, a healer and herbalist, was shown the instruments of torture yet refused to confess. Kepler handled her defense himself, and she was released.

Which Italian friar, who taught that the stars are distant suns, was burned at the stake in 1600?

Giordano Bruno also suggested that those distant suns had planets which might foster life of their own. He died in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, where a monument to him was unveiled in 1889.

Which French writer spread the tale of Newton's falling apple after hearing it from Newton's niece?

Voltaire heard the tale in London during his exile from France and retold it in his own writings. His later book on Newton's physics made the Englishman accessible to a far wider public.

Which pope acknowledged in 1992 that the Church had erred in condemning Galileo?

John Paul II spoke 359 years after the trial, closing a review he had called for in 1979. He said the theologians of Galileo's day had failed to separate the Bible from its interpretation.

Isaac Newton became the first scientist to be buried in which London church after his death in 1727?

Westminster Abbey laid Newton in the nave after his body had lain in state in its Jerusalem Chamber. The ashes of Stephen Hawking now rest between his grave and that of Charles Darwin.

Which defiant phrase is Galileo said to have muttered after being forced to recant in 1633?

"And yet it moves" appears in no record of his trial, nor in the earliest biography, written by his own pupil. The story first reached English print in 1757, more than a century later.

Doctors before the Scientific Revolution blamed illness on an imbalance of the body's four what?

Humors, namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, were the vital fluids in a theory usually credited to Hippocrates. Too much or too little of any one was read as a sign of disease.

Which kind of reasoning did Novum Organum champion over the syllogisms taught in universities?

Inductive reasoning starts from observed facts and works up to general laws. The book's title page shows a galleon sailing out past the Pillars of Hercules, leaving well-charted waters for the open Atlantic.

Before the word scientist first appeared in print in 1834, what did Isaac Newton and his peers call their field?

Natural philosophy even appears in the full title of Newton's Principia, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. William Whewell of Cambridge proposed the word scientist to replace such labels.

Which Dutch scientist invented the pendulum clock and discovered Saturn's largest moon, Titan?

Christiaan Huygens patented his clock in 1657, and it stayed the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. The European probe that landed on Titan in 2005 was named after him.

What failed to pull apart Otto von Guericke's airless Magdeburg hemispheres in his famous public demonstration?

Teams of horses strained in vain until a valve let the air back in. Guericke, who was mayor of Magdeburg, built the copper hemispheres to show off the air pump he had invented.

Which king founded the French Academy of Sciences in 1666 at the urging of his minister Colbert?

Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, let the first members meet in his own library. England's Royal Society, chartered by Charles II, had been founded six years earlier.

Which French thinker edited the Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment's 28-volume survey of knowledge?

Diderot saw the project through to its end, even after learning in 1764 that his own publisher had been quietly censoring his articles. His co-editor d'Alembert had quit years before.

Which German philosopher gave the Enlightenment its motto, Dare to know, in a famous 1784 essay?

Immanuel Kant borrowed the Latin phrase Sapere aude from the ancient poet Horace. He defined enlightenment as growing out of a self-imposed immaturity: the failure to reason without another's guidance.

Which English philosopher, trained as a physician, argued that the mind at birth is a blank slate?

John Locke held that we are born without innate ideas and that knowledge comes only from experience through the senses. He is commonly known as the father of liberalism.

Which future physician to Elizabeth I argued in 1600 that the Earth itself is one great magnet?

William Gilbert tested compass needles on a small magnetic sphere he called a terrella, his model of the planet. His Latin word electricus, meaning like amber, later gave English the word electricity.

Which marquise translated Newton's Principia into French, finishing it in the year she died, 1749?

Madame du Châtelet added her own commentary, deriving the idea of conservation of energy from Newton's mechanics. Her version, published after her death, became the standard French translation.

Which Swiss physician burned the works of Galen in public and taught that the dose makes the poison?

Paracelsus threw a copy of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, a pillar of university teaching, onto a fire in 1527. He was also probably the first to give the metal zinc its modern name.

Hans Lippershey, who sought the first telescope patent in 1608, earned his living in which trade?

Spectacle maker Lippershey was refused the patent because rivals made the same claim, though the Dutch government paid him well for copies. Galileo built his own version the following year after hearing reports of the device.

Which Cambridge chair did Isaac Newton take up in 1669, a post later held by Stephen Hawking?

Lucasian Professor of Mathematics is a chair founded in 1663 by Henry Lucas, who had been the university's Member of Parliament. Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac have held it too.

Which duchess, author of The Blazing World, was the first woman to attend a Royal Society meeting?

Margaret Cavendish made her visit in May 1667, and the diarist Samuel Pepys called her a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman. The Blazing World is one of the earliest works of science fiction.

Which naturalist sailed to Suriname in 1699 to paint the life cycles of tropical insects?

Maria Sibylla Merian made the voyage with her younger daughter. Her careful studies of caterpillars becoming butterflies helped end the old belief that insects were born of mud.

Which pope, once Galileo's patron and admirer, turned on him after the Dialogue appeared in 1632?

Urban VIII had allowed Galileo to write about the Sun-centered theory as long as he treated it as a hypothesis. He took great offense when his own argument was voiced in the book by a simpleton.

The Royal Society's motto, Nullius in verba, is usually translated as which piece of advice?

"Take nobody's word for it" suited a body whose common theme was gaining knowledge by experiment. Founded in 1660, it is the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences.

Charles II founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675 to solve which problem at sea?

Finding longitude called for exact tables of the motions of the heavens, so the king created the post of Astronomer Royal to compile them. John Flamsteed was the first to hold it.