The History of the Scientific Revolution - Essay Example

This was a period when old ideas previously accepted as wisdom were challenged by direct observation like the anatomical drawings done by Leonardo da Vinci. The Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus also made people question the existing view of geography by Ptolemy (the world is flat). These discoveries spawned a scientific revolution as they spurred new questions to be asked. There was much resistance to discoveries because the people were skeptical of these discoveries and would rather stick with their old beliefs.

But perhaps more importantly, resistance came from the Catholic Church because ideas from the scientific revolution challenged their hold on the masses by using faith and superstition. In other words, scientific discoveries threatened the social, economic, and political order based on religion, as Christianity was often the central coherent ideology in many European societies. The people would naturally tend to question the authority of the Church because there were now being offered scientific explanations based on reason and logic for many natural phenomena like lightning (just a form of electricity) and not an act of God. The scientific studies by Copernicus in 1543 theorized the Sun to be the center of the solar system and not the Earth as had previously been taught. This striking departure from past beliefs made people realize not to accept dogma as truth anymore; science started to challenge the many ideas of religion. The Enlightenment is also called the Age of Reason and it was influenced by the Scientific Revolution in the sense every observable natural phenomenon has to have an underlying scientific, logical explanation for it.

The Industrial Revolution was similar to the Scientific Revolution because it altered the way people think and perceive the natural world. In other words, it was a big paradigm shift for them and society in general. In particular, capitalism destroyed the old feudal order in which the wealth of a person was derived from ownership of vast tracts of land with many people or serfs serving in bondage as peons. The old pattern or business model (paradigm) of wealth generation coming from agricultural production no longer holds. Instead, new wealth is generated from the ownership and operation of factories and industrial production facilities turning out consumer goods and other products for domestic markets and export. The land is now merely just another input, together with labor, equipment, machinery, and capital (invested funds), to make wealth.

The aristocracy and the gentry as a distinct land-owning class ceased to exist and in their place, a new social class of newly-wealthy capitalists and industrialists came into being of which wealth creation derived from investing their capital. Additionally, a new urban middle class was born, together with the previously unseen urban slums centered near the factories hiring men, women, and children. Lastly, traditional professional guilds like carvers, weavers, and other hand craft-based associations got replaced with labor unions agitating for fair wages and conditions. A casualty was the skills-based guilds and cottage industries which got replaced with the factories as consumer and industrial products became uniform; workers now got alienated from their work as these workers now perform repetitive jobs based on the division of labor, as Karl Marx had stated in his book. Many social sectors got displaced (Bentley & Ziegler, 2010) but the new capitalists welcomed the changes while laborers and workers (previously peasants and farmers) opposed the new social and economic structures because jobs are not assured at all.