WORLD HISTORY (SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION)?

The Scientific Revolution can be roughly dated as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius published his De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body).[2] Since the time of Voltaire, some observers have considered that a revolutionary change in thought, called in recent times a scientific revolution, took place around the year 1600; that is, that there were dramatic and historically rapid changes in the ways in which scholars thought about the physical world and studied it. As with many historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about its boundaries. Although the period is commonly dated to the 16th and 17th centuries, some see elements contributing to the revolution as early as the middle ages,[3] and finding its last stages--in chemistry and biology--in the 18th and 19th centuries.[4] There is general agreement however, that the intervening period saw a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas in physics, astronomy, and biology, in institutions supporting scientific investigation, and in the more widely held picture of the universe.