Wednesday, 26 October 2011

The Clockwork Universe

To begin with this is part of Astronomy (not astrology) which is the study of the heavens.


  • Above the moon - the celestial heavens - is close to God and things were perfect and unchanging.
  • Sub lunar world - nothing was constant - elements mixed up and things changed.
  • Ptolemy's system --> the earth was the centre - the sun moved - the stars were fixed and all revolved around the earth in an unchanging motion
NEO - PYTHAGOREAN --> the belief that mathematics was important.

Francis Bacon - 1561-1626 (scientific method)
  1. Mixing religion and science (natural philosophy) = BIG MISTAKE and resulted in a load of confusion and obsession with word play. 
The New Organon --> a direct attack against Aristotle - 4 themes
  1. Knowledge is human power - the ability to harness power, to navigate, to grow crops etc
  2. Must be clear separation between science and religion
  3. Induction - proceeding from the particular to general theories that are then tested through experiment
  4. Science is dynamic (always correcting) cooperative (shared) cumulative (adding to it)
Bacon's methods - scientific and protected the people from the idols of the mind.

Locke - on human understanding
He believed understanding came from experience and was inevitably against the idea of 'innate ideas', our minds are a blank slate at birth. 

Heliocentric Modes
16th century philosopher --> Copernicus --> attempts to reform the calender with the sun as the centre
Kepler --> spent decades working on calculations and data which would prove the heliocentric model.
Galileo --> perfected the telescope and observed that Jupiter has moons.

Newton - 1642-1727
Principia - 1687 --> mathematical demonstration of what came after Copernican and Kepler.

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