Scientific Revolution
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The scientific revolution, conventionally dated from the publication of Copernicus's book on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres in 1543 to Newton's Principia of 1687, changed how Europe explained nature. Copernicus put the sun at the centre, and although his circles were still wrong the idea displaced the earth from the middle of the universe. Vesalius, whose book on the fabric of the human body appeared the same year, corrected Galen from dissections and made anatomy an observational science. Galileo turned the telescope on the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus between 1609 and 1610, evidence for the new cosmology that the church tried to suppress; he was tried in 1633 and kept under house arrest. Kepler fitted the orbits of Mars with ellipses, and William Harvey described the circulation of the blood in 1628. The method mattered as much as the results: Francis Bacon argued for induction from experiment, Rene Descartes for clear and distinct ideas and mechanical explanation, and the Royal Society was founded in London in 1660 to print experiments that could be repeated. Newton's three laws and his law of gravitation showed that one set of mathematical rules governed falling apples and planets, and the confidence that nature could be measured spread into philosophy, economics and politics.