Astronomy: The Scientific Revolution

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” (8) Sir Isaac Newton had once said a long time ago. He was one of the main contributing people that made the scientific revolution an important period in history. The scientific revolution carved the path for modern science in the way of discoveries and new reasons by having new discoveries in the fields of astronomy, biology, physics, and mathematics. The scientific revolution was a period of time from around 1543 to the late 18th century when many discoveries

Ptolemy was an Egyptian-born astronomer who lived from 90 A.D. to 168 A.D. and studied and mapped the motions of planets and stars. He created rules and laws explaining their movements. He also was the first one who placed the Earth in the center of the universe. This theory was accepted for more than 1,400 years because Ptolemy combined the movements and rules he created in order to prove his theory. Nicolaus Copernicus was a mathematician who lived from 1473 to 1543 and was the one who finally decided to investigate this theory and discovered that the sun was actually in the center of the universe instead of the Earth. He also stated that the Earth was not just one by itself but one of seven planets in the solar system. Not only did he make these discoveries but he also created the motions of the planet Earth including rotation, revolution, and annual tilting of the axis. He published everything about this theory in 1543 in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Sphere. Galileo Galilei was an astronomer who lived from 1564 to 1642 and built on Copernicus’s work. He believed that the Sun, not the Earth, was motionless. He published his theories in The Starry Messenger on the year 1610 which stated that Jupiter has at least four moons, that those moons have a rough surface, the discoveries of star’s invisible to the bare human eye, and differences between planets and fixed stars’