Scientific Revolution: Crash Course European History #12

Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

Okay so look: It has been bleak so far.

We’ve had the Black Death, the 116 Years’ War, a series of religious wars that culminated

with a 30 Years War that killed 20% of Central Europe.

We’ve had the little ice age and witch murdering mania and the Atlantic slave trade but now,

now we get to turn our attention to the scientific revolution, which profoundly reshaped our

understanding of the universe and ourselves.

At last, we are going to make real, undeniable progress.

What’s that?

Oh, Stan tells me that many of these scientists were persecuted for sciencing.

Great.

But that doesn’t stop humans from developing the central insight that reshapes human history.

It’s about to get really heliocentric around here...

[Intro] Before we get into the scientific revolution,

I just want to make one broad comment that might be obvious if you’ve watched previous

videos in this series: For most of human history, people did not expect to live healthier or

more prosperous lives than previous generations.

Sometimes life got better, and sometimes it got worse.

It’s true that human populations were increasing and that life expectancy was increasing gradually,

but the idea that it is normal for human life to get better over time is very new.

Today, most European countries have high life expectancy, low maternal mortality, and low

rates of absolute poverty.

But there have been about 10,000 generations of humans, and we are perhaps the 10th generation

who could reliably expect disease burden and child mortality and poverty to steadily decrease

in our lifetimes.

Well, I’m part of the 10th.

You’re probably part of the 11th.

But regardless, we owe much of this change to the Scientific Revolution.

So, like the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution was another break with religious teachings.

The Catholic Church taught that the earth was the center of the universe and had been

so since the Creation.

The sun, moon, and planets traveled around the earth in perfectly circular orbits like

the rings of an onion.

And beyond the onion was the realm of the divine, whose light pierced through in the

form of stars.

All this perfect motion was the work of God Himself.

And any other understanding of the universe was thus a challenge to God’s eternal perfection

as described in the scriptures.

But, like good Renaissance people, the new astronomers, mathematicians, and their colleagues

in other fields declared that old theories needed to be reexamined.

The first problem was that the perfect orbits of the planets, and moon, and sun did not

fit with observation, causing astronomers to resort to ancient Ptolemaic explanations

(basically that planets followed their own circular paths, which also revolved around

the Earth).