Learning about the Pendulum and Improving Science Education

Abstract

The scientific revolution is clearly one of the great episodes in human history. Its scientific, philosophical, and cultural impact, initially on Europe, and subsequently on the rest of the world, has been without parallel. The core of the scientific revolution occurred in the half-century between the publication of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1633) and Newton’s Principia (1687).¹ In this period Newton brought to fruition what Galileo had begun.² A mathematical-experimental way of interrogating nature displaced the varied common-sensical-observational-philosophical ways that had hitherto dominated attempts to understand and control the world. From the perspective of world history it was a singular and contingent event. Great civilizations had existed in Europe, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas for thousands of years, yet none of them came close to producing that way of understanding the world that was characteristic of the new science of 17th-century Europe. The Galilean-Newtonian method (or Galilean-Newtonian Paradigm, GNP, as it has been called) originated in physics and quickly flowed to other scientific and to nonscientific fields. The new science, frequently in conjunction with colonial and commercial interests, spread rapidly from its origins in western Europe to the far reaches of the globe.³ The science of western Europe, became Western science, or “universal science.” Of its cultural significance for Europe, the historian Herbert Butterfield has written:

Since the Scientific Revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the Middle Ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.... it changed the character of men’s habitual mental operations even in the conduct of non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality...(Butterfield, 1949, p. viii)