What major scientific work was published in 1543, conventionally marking the start of the Scientific Revolution?
Copernicus's *De Revolutionibus*, published as he was dying in 1543, proposed that the Earth orbited the Sun rather than the reverse. Galileo's *Dialogue* was 1632 (and led to his trial); Kepler's *Astronomia Nova* was 1609 (the first two laws of planetary motion); Newton's *Principia* was 1687 (and ends the Scientific Revolution rather than starting it). 1543 also saw Vesalius's *De Humani Corporis Fabrica*, the foundational text of modern anatomy.
Read the full facts →The Scientific Revolution was the period of intellectual change in Europe between approximately 1543 and 1687 during which modern science emerged from medieval natural philosophy. It produced heliocentric astronomy, classical mechanics, and the methodological commitment to mathematical and experimental method.
Daily quiz appearances
Related questions
- What 1687 book by Isaac Newton is the foundational text of modern physics?
- Johannes Kepler arrived at the University of Tübingen as a 17-year-old scholarship student in 1589. Which of his teachers privately taught him that the Copernican heliocentric system was correct — at a time when the Lutheran consistory's official curriculum required teaching the Ptolemaic geocentric system?
- What was the Antikythera mechanism designed to do?
- What technique in Archimedes's *Method of Mechanical Theorems* anticipated what later mathematics?