Nicolas Copernicus

Copernicus is said to be the founder of modern astronomy. He made

his celestial observations from a turret situated on the protective wall
around the cathedral, observations were made "bare eyeball," so to
speak, as a hundred more years were to pass before the invention of
the telescope. In 1530, Copernicus completed and gave to the world
his great work De Revolutionibus, which asserted that the earth
rotated on its axis once daily and traveled around the sun once
yearly: a fantastic concept for the times. Up to the time of Copernicus,
the thinkers of the western world believed that the earth was a fixed,
immovable mass, located at the center of the universe, and all
celestial bodies, including the sun and the fixed stars, revolved
around it.
Copernicus was in no hurry to publish his theory, because he was a
perfectionist and he never thought, even after working on it for thirty
years, that his complete work was ready. Copernicus died in 1543 not
knowing the affect his theories would have on scientific thought. His
theory went against the philosophical and religious beliefs that had
been held during the medieval times. Copernicus' theories might well
lead men to think that they are simply part of nature and not superior
to it.
Johannes Kepler

In 1594 Kepler accepted an appointment as professor of mathematics at the

Protestant seminary in Graz (in the Austrian province of Styria). He was also
appointed district mathematician and calendar maker. Kepler remained in
Graz until 1600, when all Protestants were forced to convert to Catholicism or
leave the province, as part of the Catholic Counter Reformation.
Kepler was invited by Tycho Brahe to Prague to become his assistant and
calculate the orbits planets going around the sun. Kepler served as Brahe's
assistant until the latter's death in 1601 and was then appointed Tycho's
successor. His first job was to prepare Brahe's collection of studies in
astronomy for publication, which came out between 1601 and 1602. Looking
through Brahe’s data, he found that the orbits of all planets were elliptical
and not in circles. Kepler believed that nature followed numeric relationships
since God created it according to "weight, measure and number."
Kepler wandered over Europe in the last three years of his life, trying to avoid
the Catholic Counter Reformation. He was in Ulm, Germany, when his
Tabulae Rudolphinae (1628) was published. It not only added the positions of
over two hundred stars to those contained in Brahe's published works, but it
also provided planetary tables that became the standard for the next century.
Galileo Galilei

Galileo grew up on the fringes of the Medici court, but started to make a
name for himself with his scientific discoveries. As Galileo's reputation spread
through Italy and Europe, his Medici patrons bestowed celebrity and
protection. In return, Galileo ensured that his discoveries were unveiled at the
court of the Medici as a form of court entertainment.
As long as his patrons were entertained, Galileo was a safe man, although he
was living in dangerous times. The Roman Inquisition could investigate any
suspicion of heresy including Galileo's unorthodox ideas. To contradict the
Church was suicide, as his friend Giordano Bruno found when he announced
that the universe was infinite. In 1610 Bruno was burned alive.

For more than 1,000-years, the Church had taught that the sun and all the
planets revolved around the earth. But Galileo came to the radical conclusion
that the earth in fact revolved around the sun.
He had a choice: protect himself or publish what he knew to be true. He chose
to publish.

The Pope decided that enough was enough. Galileo was summoned to face the
inquisition in Rome. Interrogated for months, he resisted all pressure to
recant, until his patrons stopped paying his expenses. On June 21 1633,
Galileo gave in and declared the sun rotated around the Earth. Galileo was
sentenced to house-arrest and died a broken man in 1642.
In 1992 the Vatican finally admitted the church had been wrong. Galileo had
been right all along.
Issac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, an English scientist, changed the way we look at

the world. He is most famous for his work on gravity. Some say he
figured this out by watching an apple drop from a tree, but others
question whether or not this really happened.
He graduated from Trinity College (which is part of Cambridge
University) in 1665. Around this time he wrote out a proof about the
law of gravity, which was published about twenty years later
as Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called
Principia). In this ground-breaking 1687 publication, Newton
discussed how the planets move, how there are forces at work that
hold the universe together, and other scientific ideas. He established
several rules, which are now known as Newton's Laws of Motion. His
revolutionary work got other scientists thinking about how the
universe works and about the physical rules that affect life on Earth.
He later became president of the Royal Society, an important science
organization, in 1703. Two years later, he was knighted by Queen
Anne, which made him "Sir Isaac Newton." Newton died on March 20,
1727. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a famous place of
worship where many kings and other important figures have been laid
to rest. Newton became the first scientist to receive such an honor.
William Harvey

Harvey became court physician to King James I in 1618 and then to

Charles I in 1625, a post he held until Charles was beheaded in 1649.
Charles provided Harvey with deer from the royal parks for his
medical research, and Harvey remained loyal to Charles even during
the Cromwellian Civil War.
Harvey's great contribution to medicine was his revolutionary
discovery of the circulation of blood. His many experimental
dissections and vivisections convinced Harvey that current theories
were wrong- blood did not form in the liver and flow through the
septum (dividing wall) of the heart. Harvey first studied the heartbeat,
establishing the existence of the pulmonary (heart-lung-heart)
circulation and noting the one-way flow of blood. When he also
comprehended how much blood was pumped by the heart, he realized
there must be a constant amount of blood flowing through the
arteries and returning through the veins of the heart, a continuing
circular flow.
Harvey published this radical new concept of blood circulation in
1628. It provoked immediate controversy and hostility. The discovery
of capillaries by Marcello Malpighi in 1661 provided the factual
evidence to confirm Harvey's theory of blood circulation. Harvey's
method of drawing reasoned conclusions from meticulous
observation formed the basis for future research in medicine.
Francis Bacon

How do we know that something is true? In 1620, around the time that
people first began to look through microscopes, an English politician
named Sir Francis Bacon developed a method for philosophers to use
in weighing the truthfulness of knowledge. For example, in order to
test the idea that sickness came from external causes, Bacon argued
that scientists should expose healthy people to outside influences
such as coldness, wetness, or other sick people to discover if any of
these external variables resulted in more people getting
sick. Knowing that many different causes for sickness might be
missed by humans who are unable or unwilling to perceive them,
Bacon insisted that these experiments must be consistently repeated
before truth could be known: a scientist must show that patients
exposed to a specific variable more frequently got sick again, and
again, and again.
Throughout his life, Bacon moved from one success to
another. However, he was always in debt and finally lost favor with
the crown in 1621- he was convicted of corruption and heavily
fined. For a few days he was confined in the Tower of London. In
March 1626, Bacon was performing a series of experiments with ice.
While testing the effects of cold on the preservation and decay of
meat, he caught a cold. He soon developed bronchitis and died a
week later.