The Scientific Revolution in seventeenth-century Europe was Western civilization’s adolescent growth spurt. Methods were found to expose the workings of Nature and set rolling four centuries of technological, medical, and intellectual progress. No other civilization did that of its own accord, though some have been eager enough to imitate the results. Understanding what exactly happened, and how and why it happened (and how and why it didn’t happen anywhere else) is important. It is also, as contemporary jargon has it, “contested.”
Some of those doing the contesting are the usual suspects, writers of postmodernist bent who object to the whole notion that science progresses and often works its way towards the truth. Wootton writes, “The anxiety which now troubles historians when they read the words ‘scientific,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘modern’ and (worst of all) ‘progress’ in studies of seventeenth-century natural science is not just a fear of anachronistic language; it is a symptom of a much larger intellectual crisis which has expressed itself in a general retreat from grand narratives of every sort.” Quite so.
Wootton is no relativist and tells a firmly “Whig” history, in the sense of a story of progress from ignorance to success. It is not a survey of the Scientific Revolution’s discoveries, or a popular history of seventeenth-century science. It is more a description of intellectual tools with examples—tools like geometry and the model of the universe as a clock, the concepts of hypothesis, evidence and facts, the idea of how to confront theory
