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How Revolutionary — and How Scientific — Was the Scientific Revolution?
September 13, 2016, 7:00 PM
Free
Professor of Philosophy Dan Cohen (Colby, Class of ’75) will discuss the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, which marked a sea change in Western thought about the world and humanity’s place in it. At its start, we located ourselves at the center of a finite, harmonious, purpose-filled cosmos. By its end, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic complex of theories gave way to a Newtonian universe quantitatively defined by space and time, matter and motion, and mass and momentum. It also gave the world two powerful ideas: science and a scientific revolution. In retrospect, neither one is a perfect fit in describing that era.