Did you know #38| Birth of modern science

raghwendra (57)in #facts • 7 years ago

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"As the monopoly of the Church over scientific truth began to weaken in the Western world, the year 1543 saw the publication of two ground-breaking books.

"Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius produced De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which described his dissections of human corpses with exquisite illustrations. In the same year, Polish physician Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, "which stated firmly that the Sun is the centre of the Universe, overturning the Earth-centred model worked out by Ptolemy of Alexandria a millennium earlier."

In 1600, English physician William Gilbert published De Magnete in which he explained that compass needles point north because Earth itself is a magnet. He even argued that Earth’s core is made of iron. In 1623, another English physician, William Harvey, described for the first time how the heart acts as a pump and drives blood around the body, thereby quashing forever earlier theories that dated back 1,400 years to the Greco-Roman physician Galen. In the 1660s, Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle produced a string of "books, includingThe Sceptical Chymist, in which he defined a chemical element. This marked the birth of chemistry as a science, as distinct from the mystical alchemy from which it arose.

Robert Hooke, who worked for a time as Boyle’s assistant, produced the first scientific bestseller, Micrographia, in 1665. His superb fold-out illustrations of subjects such as a flea and the eye of a fly opened up a microscopic world no one had seen before. Then in 1687 came what many view as the most important science book of all time, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, commonly known as the Principia. His laws of motion and principle of universal gravity form the basis for classical physics.