Scientific Revolution & Enlightenment

Scientific Revolution

• Francis Bacon  -  Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the great philosophers of the Scientific Revolution. His thoughts on logic and ethics in science and his ideas on the cooperation and interaction of the various fields of science, presented in his work Novum Organum, have remained influential in the scientific world to this day.
• Robert Boyle  -  Boyle (1627-1691), a successful physicist at Oxford college, worked with his colleague Robert Hooke to discern the properties of the air, experimenting with air pressure and the composition of the atmosphere. Boyle proved that only a part of the air is used in respiration and combustion, and is thus credited with the discovery of oxygen. Boyle's further work touched on the beginnings of the study of matter on the atomic scale.

Enlightenment

• Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, in a manor house in Woolthorpe, a village in the English county of Lincoln.More than twenty years elapsed between Newton's first conception of gravitation and the publication, in 1686-7, of Newton's great work on gravity and physics, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known to posterity as the Principia. In these two decades, scientific inquiry did not stand still, and other minds had pondered versions of Newton's initial idea--that the force of attraction holding planets in their orbits varied inversely with the square of their distance from the sun.

• Robert Hooke (1635-1708)

  Robert Hooke was perhaps one of the most important scientists from the 17th century.  While his research and findings were often overshadowed by those of his rival Sir  Isaac Newton, one cannot argue their importance in the development of fields such as physics, astronomy, biology, and medicine, to name a few.Robert Hooke looked at a sliver of cork through a microscope lens and noticed some "pores" or "cells" in it. Robert Hooke believed the cells had served as containers for the "noble juices" or "fibrous threads" of the once-living cork tree. He thought these cells existed only in plants, since he and his scientific contemporaries had observed the structures only in plant material. Robert Hooke wrote Micrographia, the first book describing observations made through a microscope. The drawing to the top left was created by Hooke. Hooke was the first person to use the word "cell" to identify microscopic structures when he was describing cork. Hooke also wrote Hooke's Law -- a law of elasticity for solid bodies.
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