We explain what modern science is and how the Scientific Revolution emerged. Also, what are its main characteristics.
What is modern science?
Modern science is understood as the way of conceiving the world and the scientific knowledge that serves to describe it that It was built in the West during the 16th and 17th centuries in what is commonly called the Scientific Revolution of the Renaissance.
Modern science is governed by fundamental principles whose appearance and demonstration meant a powerful renewal of the fields of chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology and human anatomy, under the idea that all the phenomena of reality respond to a comprehensible theoretical formulation.
It could be said that the bases of contemporary science, with all its aspects and possibilities, are in this scientific renewal that occurred based on two stages: a first of recovery of the philosophical and scientific legacy of classical antiquity, demonized by the centuries of domination religious on the European mentality, and a second of innovation and radical changes, whose best example is the replacement of the geocentric model of the universe proposed by Aristotle and defended by the Church, with the Heliocentric of Nicolás Copernicus.
It is considered that the Scientific Revolution has as its starting and closing point the publication of two great scientific works: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the Movements of the Celestial Orbs”) by Nicholas Copernicus in 1543 and Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis (“Mathematical principles of natural philosophy”) by Isaac Newton in 1687.
Characteristics of modern science
Modern science is characterized by:
- The scientific method. Formally postulated by René Descartes in the 17th century, the method of science emerged as a form of research that separated scientific knowledge from tradition, authority and faith, allowing it a direct and proper relationship with its objects of interest, in place of previous historical reasoning.
- Empiricism. Similarly, science adopted empiricism, that is, the valuation of perceptible and reproducible experiences as a model of knowledge of the real world, instead of sticking to isolated reasoning as occurred in antiquity.
- The experimentation. The logical step in this scientific evolution was the experimental method, which proposed the reproduction in a controlled environment of a specific phenomenon of reality in order to determine how it occurs and what forces are involved in it, testing beliefs through live demonstration. of scientific theories.
- The mathematization. Mathematics is one of the oldest sciences that exist, and was always used by philosophers and naturalists; But since the Scientific Revolution, they began to be applied to the measurement of phenomena existing in reality, considering the certainty they provided as the only one achievable by man, “equivalent to that of God,” Galileo Galilei would say.
- Institutionalization. The modern Science that emerged at that time takes the first steps towards its existence as an institution of human knowledge, separated from the traditional fields of philosophy, religion and literature, going on to occupy a predominant role in the world to come.
