– Welcome to the University of Wisconsin-Platteville’s College of Liberal Arts and Education Faculty Forum Series. I’m Dr. Kory Wein, Associate Dean of the college. It is my great pleasure to introduce tonight’s speaker,

Dr. Nancy Turner. Dr. Turner is a Professor of History at UW-Platteville, where she has taught since 1996. She holds a BA degree in History in German, from the University of Missouri- Columbia,

and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Iowa. Dr. Turner’s area of specialty is Late Medieval History, with a focus on Christian and non-Christian relations in the High and Late Middle Ages.

She teaches a variety of courses at UW-Platteville, but her favorite is her course on the History of Western Science. Along with several published articles on Christian theologians’ attitudes towards Jews in the Late Middle Ages,

Dr. Turner is working on an article that began as her keynote address at a conference on Alchemical Cosmology, held at Purdue University in 2013. Her talk tonight is based upon a book she is writing

for Hackett Publishing, that will be titled “Seven Myths of the Scientific Revolution,” as part of Hackett’s “Seven Myths” series. At the end, there will be time for questions. So, without further ado, please welcome

Dr. Nancy Turner. (audience applauds) – It’s a great pleasure to be here, and I want to thank all of you for coming to my talk tonight. So, the title of my talk reads “Five Myths about the Scientific Revolution,”

and for the purposes of my talk, I’m going to use the years of 1500 to 1700 as the dates for the Scientific Revolution. You’ll sometimes encounter people who use the year of 1543 as the year

that the Scientific Revolution began, because that is the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, Placing the Sun at the Center of the universe, was first published, and you’ll sometimes encounter the year 1727 as the end date for the Scientific

Revolution, because that’s the year in which Isaac Newton died, but I like using 1500 as the beginning dates, because there were scientific thinkers, including Copernicus, who were already presenting radically new ideas about the natural world in the decades leading up

to 1543, and 1700 as the date helps to remove Isaac Newton from being such a central focus of the Scientific Revolution. This 200-year period has earned the label Scientific Revolution because many of the natural philosophers

and natural philosopher was the word used instead of “scientist,” all the way from ancient times until the early 19th century, when the word “scientist” was first coined, but it was during these 200 years that the practitioners of natural philosophy then

began to rigorously and wholeheartedly question the explanations and conclusions about the natural world that had been arrived at and taught by Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, and still dominated the teachings about the natural

world in the 1500s, particularly the teachings of Aristotle in the areas of physics, astronomy, and biology, and then, the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen in the areas of medicine and human anatomy, but the thinkers of the Scientific

Revolution did not simply question the conclusions of previous scientific thinkers, they began to suggest new and often radically different conclusions and ways of understanding and describing the natural world. So, I’ve noticed that many people who have a notion

of what the Scientific Revolution was about have several consistent misperceptions, shall we say, about the ideas and thinkers associated with the Scientific Revolution, and, although I could come up with probably eight or ten common myths

I’ve encountered, let me tonight just present five myths, or, as I said, misperceptions that I’ve discovered people hold, that I’d like to address and correct. The first is the common belief that the popes of the

16th century condemned Copernicus’s theory and all those who supported it. That’s a myth, as we’ll see. The second, that the Protestant Reformation was a social and religious movement and thus had no impact upon the Scientific Revolution.

Third, new discoveries in medicine and biology lagged behind discoveries in astronomy and physics during the Scientific Revolution. Again, a myth. Four, the thinkers behind the Scientific Revolution disdained the use of

mysticism and spirituality in pursuing new knowledge about the natural world. And, finally, the alchemists of the Scientific Revolution were solely interested in finding a way to transform lead into gold. All misperceptions. So, let’s start with the

misperception many people have concerning the 16th century reception of Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-Centered universe. I think it’s commonly believed today that Copernicus postponed the publication of his famous work “On the Revolution

of the Heavenly Spheres” until he was on his death bed, out of fear that the Pope, or other powerful members of the Christian clergy would attack and condemn him for his theory, and I’ve noticed it’s commonly believed that Copernicus’s

fear of going public with his idea was based upon the fact that there are several passages in the Bible that clearly imply that the Earth remains stationary and at the center of the cosmos and it’s the Sun and the planets that

move in a circle around it. However, it’s simply not true that popes during Copernicus’s lifetime, or during the decades that followed his death attacked or denounced Copernicus’s Sun-Centered model of the universe, and I should point

out, of course, that Copernicus was incorrect when he argued that the Sun was at the center of the universe, because we know today that the Sun is only at the center of our tiny little Solar System, but astronomers in the 16th century

didn’t know that yet, but, not only did the popes of the 16th century not condemn the Copernican model, but, as I’ll address in a minute, Pope Gregory XIII in the 1580s actually adopted Copernicus’s Sun-Centered model of

the universe as a tool to reform the Western calendar, so that the date for Easter could be more accurately calculated, and it was actually within the context of calendar reform that Copernicus first began to ponder the movements of the

Sun and the planets. So, let me back up just a little bit and briefly talk about Copernicus’s life and his studies. There we have his photo and his death dates, and, indeed, he did die in the same year that his magnum opus

was finally published: his work “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. ” Copernicus was born in 1473 in what is now northern Poland. As a young man, Copernicus studied medicine and canon law in Italy, and, after completing his studies

in 1503, he got a job, if you will, as a church canon. Basically, that means he was a clerical administrator of a cathedral, in this case, and its parish, in the city of Frombork, or Frauenburg, among the German

speakers, but near his hometown back in Poland, and he remained in that job and in that town of Frombork for the rest of his life, but, by the time Copernicus was 30 years old, he had already gained a reputation

as a very talented mathematician whose interests included astronomy, and, sometime between 1503 and 1513, Copernicus became convinced that a heliocentric or Sun-Centered universe was the physical reality

of the cosmos. We’re not entirely sure how or why Copernicus came to this conclusion, but we know he had done so by 1513, because in 1514, very early in the 16th century, he published a short book called

“Commentariolus,” or “Short Commentary,” in which he presented the basics of his Sun-Centered model and explained the ways in which it was superior to the Earth-centered model of the Greco-Roman astronomer, Ptolemy, and it was

Ptolemy’s Earth-centered model that had been taught and used in Europe beginning in about 200 AD or CE, and was still being taught in universities in the 1500s, and here we have Copernicus’s Sun-Centered universe, and this is the actual diagram, or it’s a copy

of the actual diagram in his work, and there he wrote his work in Latin, and you have there in the center Sol, or the Sun, and, then, he presents Mercury, Venus. The Earth is the Telluris, and, at this point, Earth was

the only planet known to have a satellite of any kind, and that was the Moon. Notice that, by this point, actually into the 1700s, there were only six planets known, with Saturn being the farthest away. So, this is Copernicus’s

heliocentric universe. Here’s Ptolemy’s, the Ancient Greco-Roman thinker, who came up with an Earth-centered model, that he didn’t claim was the reality of the cosmos, he simply presented it as a way to calculate, and, if you will, predict

the movements of the planets. We know, and you can see here, that the Earth is in the center, and the Sun is, if you will, the third entity in the line of planets, but you’ll notice that Copernicus had, in order to make his model

work in any way, create calculations that were useful in any way, Copernicus had to add these extra circles, known as epicircles that went around, no, actually, that every planet circled. So, these circles,

and you can see the little planets on these outer orbits, if you will, these were the epicycles on which the planets then circled, but the center of the epicycles was centered around the actual orbits.

Now, this was a time in which ancient thinkers, coming from Aristotle, believed that the orbits of the planets, or that the planets were actually encased in true crystalline spheres, which would mean that this sort of model was like an onion, and

you could peal away the layers, and then, get the next crystalline sphere. There’s no way to make crystalline spheres work if you have to say that the planets are embedded in them if you have epicycles, because the planets would break

the crystalline spheres, and Ptolemy acknowledged that and argued or suggested that this placing all of the planets and, then, the fixed stars, the stars that didn’t move, suggesting that this model was not supposed to be viewed as the

physical truth, the physical reality of the cosmos, but just a convenient model, if you will, to be used to move the planets around in your head, and then, calculate where they should be, or where they would be over time, in relation

to each other, but this system was known as the Ptolemaic system, and was the system that Copernicus was coming up against when talking to other scientists. So, the short work that Copernicus

published right back in 1514 described the basics of his heliocentric universe, but it contained no mathematical equations, no diagrams, but did precisely outline Copernicus’s argument, and this is what was very significant

about Copernicus’s idea, that not only did placing the Sun in the center of the universe result in more accurate calculations, predicting the movements of the planets, it also provided a schema that was simpler than imagining that the Sun and all of the fixed stars

and planets all moved, these huge entities moved around the Earth once a day, but Copernicus argued and was convinced that the heliocentric universe was the physical truth. He was presenting his model not simply

as a convenient way to calculate the movements of the heavens. Copernicus was insisting that this was the reality, that the Sun was in the center of the universe. He pointed out that putting the Sun in the universe offered a simpler image of the cosmos, because

he pointed out it would explain why it was that Mercury and Venus had phases as they moved across the sky, just like the Moon does, and that’s because Mercury and Venus are between the Earth and the Sun.

He argued that the Sun-Centered universe better explains the retrogressing movements of the planets, in other words, the fact that all of the planets appear, as they’re moving across the night sky, appear to back up, if you will,

and make a loop, and then, straighten out again, for a while, and then, back up and make a loop. It was this that Ptolemy was trying to understand, or trying to explain with his epicycles, because you can see how the planets.

. . Let’s use Mars. Mars would eventually go backward on the epicycle, as the whole orbit was moving along. Copernicus explained how one could get rid of that with a

Sun-Centered universe, and Copernicus’s “Short Summary,” laying out his Sun-Centered model was well received when it came out in 1514, and Copernicus suffered no negative repercussions from it.

In fact, his arguments for a Sun-Centered universe quickly became well-known and admired in scientifically-educated circles, throughout Europe, over the next 30 years, and we know that his new model was known and being taught,

because a young German mathematician, named Georg Joachim Rheticus, we learned that Rheticus had been introduced to Copernicus’s theory by his teacher at the University of Wittenberg, and Rheticus was so intrigued

by Copernicus’s model, that, in 1539, he set out to meet Copernicus, in order to learn the details of Copernicus’s model. When Rheticus met with Copernicus, in 1539, in Frombork, he discovered that, by this time,

Copernicus had completed a 400-page work that he had titled On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, and, in this document, this volume, Copernicus did provide multiple diagrams, extensive calculations,

and in-depth explanations for his argument, defending it and explaining it. And, as I said, it’s clear in this version of “On the Revolutions,” that Copernicus was arguing that the Sun was indeed truly in the center of the universe, and that he didn’t mean

his theory or model to be understood as simply a possible configuration of the planets that could be used to produce more reliable predictions, and this is important, trust me, as I’ll explain in a minute. However, Copernicus

was very much a product of his society and culture, and assumed, as everybody did, including Galileo, that the planets moved in perfect circular orbits, and, using perfectly circular orbits for the planets, even with the Sun in

the center, resulted in calculations that were more accurate than the Ptolemaic system, but were still not perfectly accurate. So, even the Copernican system didn’t provide a way of predicting the movements of a planet

that came out perfectly, because it would be 1609 before Johannes Kepler determined that the planets move in elliptical orbits, not circular orbits, and thus finally allowing for precise and perfectly accurate calculations of planetary movements. So, Copernicus’s system

with the Sun in the center was only slightly more accurate than Ptolemy’s Earth-centered universe, and, of course, Copernicus recognized this, and it was this lack of perfect accuracy, not fear of the Pope, that made

Copernicus apprehensive about publishing his magnum opus, because he feared that the mathematicians and astronomers of Europe, his peers, if you will, would notice that his calculations did not result in perfectly

accurate predictions, and, thus, would disdain and dismiss him and his arguments, or, at the very least, say “This is nice, “but it has to be just another possible theory, “because it doesn’t explain “the exact movements

all that much better “than what we currently have. ” Besides that, Copernicus knew that a Sun-Centered universe would sound foolish and actually impossible to many people, because many people did begin asking the question

that if the Earth spun, and it had to spin very quickly, to rotate once a day, why didn’t humans spin off the surface of the Earth, and Copernicus had no answer to that. They also asked “So, why, if the surface

“of the Earth is spinning, again, extremely quickly, “why would it be that, if you throw rocks “or any item very high up in the sky, “why does it fall exactly down “from where it came up? “Shouldn’t it fall a few feet behind,

“or in front?” because the ground would be moving under it. And that’s not what happened. So, he was aware that a Sun-Centered universe might be hard to get people to accept, or embrace, because it goes against

all of our sense data. I mean, we stand on the Earth and we feel ourselves stationary, and we see the planets, the Sun, and everything moving around us. So, our sense data tells us that the Copernican theory or model must be wrong. Rheticus’s indispensable

contribution to Western science was that he was able to convince Copernicus, as Copernicus was faced with all of these doubts, or fear of scientific backlash, Copernicus was able to convince. .

. I’m sorry, Rheticus was able to convince Copernicus that natural philosophers and mathematicians all over Europe would not ridicule his book, but, instead, would be intrigued and impressed. In 1540, then, Copernicus

agreed to allow Rheticus to first, publish a “Short Summary,” again, of his longer On the Revolutions, which, again, contained Copernicus’s key heliocentric arguments, along with a promise that the longer, complete

work would appear soon. This “Short Summary” of 1540 attracted so much attention within the scientific community, that a second edition of this little book was printed the very next year, in 1541. And then, finally, with the help of Rheticus,

the full text edition of “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres” was finally published in Nuremberg in 1543, and the reception of Copernicus’s complete work was so positive within the scientific world, that, tellingly, a second

edition of the work was published in 1566, and, as I’ll point out later, a third edition of the book was published in 1617, a year after the Pope put it on the Index of Forbidden Books. Now, it’s frequently pointed out, as it should be,

that one reason that Copernicus’s Sun-Centered model did not attract the immediate ire, if you will, of the Pope, was that Rheticus, who Copernicus had put in charge of delivering his work to a publisher, at the very last minute, gave

the manuscript to an associate named Andreas Osiander, and, apparently, Osiander had less courage than Rheticus and Copernicus did, because, apparently, in order to protect Copernicus from possible attack

by Church authorities, Osiander wrote himself, wrote and attached a preface to Copernicus’s book, that implied it had been written by Copernicus himself, and that stated in effect that the Sun-Centered model

described in the book was meant to be viewed simply as one of many possible hypotheses concerning the position and movements of the planets, the Earth, the Sun, and that Copernicus meant for his model simply to be used to come up

with more accurate calculations. When Rheticus discovered this added preface, he was furious with his friend, but, nevertheless, there it was. The book was published with this preface, and this false preface had the effect that Osiander

intended it to have, in that it seems to have watered down the impact of Copernicus’s heliocentric universe, and made it easier for religious officials to accept what they saw as simply a useful hypothesis, and remember Copernicus’s

heliocentric model still did not produce perfectly accurate calculations. So, it was reasonable to assume that it was not the reality, the physical reality. The physical reality would produce exact and perfect calculations.

So, this made it possible for even the most literal readers of the Bible to embrace or accept Copernicus’s system as only a hypothesis, and on the issue of the way planetary motion was described in the Bible,

there was actually no consensus at that time, even among Roman Catholic theologians about how literally the Bible was to be understood when it came to descriptions of the natural world. It was common by the second half of the 16th century

to encounter multiple theologians and scientists who were arguing that God had meant the teachings of the Bible to be understandable to even the most simple believers, and thus, it was not meant to be viewed as describing the physical

reality of the natural world, if such descriptions would be too confusing or hard to understand for simple readers. And there were Catholic Church leaders who openly argued that Scripture should not be read as a guide to scientific fact, but

only as a guide to salvation. So, for instance, in 1598, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, named Cesare Baronius stated, quote: “The intention “of the Bible is to teach us how”. . .

I’m sorry. “The intention of the Bible is to teach us how one goes “to heaven, not how the heavens go. ” And this attitude is very likely why Pope Gregory XIII in the 1580s was willing to actually embrace

the Sun-Centered model, because, for several centuries, popes have been trying to come up with a more accurate way of predicting when the first fool moon after the spring equinox. . .

No, when the Sunday of the first full moon after the spring equinox would occur, so that the date of Easter could be more accurately and consistently predicted, and the Copernican model did allow this,

and, indeed, using the Copernican model, Pope Gregory issued a brand-new calendar, with corrections based upon the Sun-Centered model, and this reformed calendar, which got rid of ten days, or moved up the days by ten, is

the calendar we call the Gregorian calendar, and is still the calendar we use today. It replaced the calendar introduced by Julius Caesar back in about 45 BCE. So, in the course between 1543 and the early 1600s, there was no condemnation

whatsoever coming from the pope, or religious leaders, and, indeed, even when, in 1616, finally, a pope placed Copernicus’s work on the index of forbidden books, that pope declared that the information contained in Copernicus’s book was not heretical,

but only false. And then, in 1617, as I said before, a third edition of “On the Revolutions” was published in Protestant Amsterdam, without the false preface by Osiander, and, again, there were

no negative repercussions for those who openly held the Copernican system. And, indeed, we know that in the decades leading up to 1616, that there were ten thinkers who openly identified themselves as Copernicans, as true Copernicans,

in other words, thinkers who believed that it was the physical reality that the Sun was at the center of the universe, and that the Earth was just another one of the six planets. Seven of these ten natural philosophers

were German. I’m sorry, seven of the ten were Protestants, and the last three were Roman Catholics, and this will become important in a minute. And these ten thinkers encountered no persecution at all, no pushback,

no condemnation for their open support of the physical truth of a Sun-Centered universe. Indeed, the Lutheran Protestant Johannes Kepler published his first, the first of many, of his overtly pro-Copernican works,

called “Secrets of the Cosmos,” in 1596, and afterwards went on to be employed and respected by two deeply Catholic Holy Roman Emperors, and was never hold up before the Inquisition for any of his pro-Copernican works,

and I might add that Galileo was not really punished for supporting a Sun-Centered universe. He was actually punished for belligerently and very rudely arguing with the pope and his administrators about a Sun-Centered universe. So, I mentioned just a minute

ago that six of the ten open or overt Copernicans by 1600 were Protestants, and that is not an unimportant fact to note, because these leaves me to address another myth about the scientific revolution, and that is that the Protestant

Reformation was a social and religious movement, and thus had no impact upon the Scientific Revolution. As a historian of science, one of the central concepts, if not even the central concept I work to get my students to grasp and accept

is that scientists in Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern Times, as well as today cannot help but be heavily influenced by the beliefs, and assumptions, and values of the society they live in, and that

those beliefs, assumptions, and values have a profound influence on the mindset of scientific thinkers, as well as the conclusions they are capable of drawing about the world around them. Let me illustrate, then, how the Protestant Reformation

and the changes in religious outlook it brought benefited and encouraged the acceptance of the Copernican theory. Let me very quickly present the broad outlines of the Protestant Reformation, so that its influence can

be more apparent. The Reformation was sparked, or started in 1517, in Wittenberg, Germany, by the German monk, Martin Luther, who, after carefully studying the Bible, decided that, for the previous 1300 years or so,

the Catholic Church had been misunderstanding the Bible, and thus misinterpreting God’s will concerning salvation and the proper way to lead a Christian life, and among Luther’s many new conclusions about God’s will was

his assertion that any beliefs or behaviors that had been prescribed by the popes or church councils, saints, whatever, that any of those beliefs or behaviors that Luther couldn’t find described in the Bible were not valid,

and should not be followed or practiced, and among the things Luther declared could not be found in the Bible, couldn’t be described in the Bible was the concept of a pope. So, Luther insisted that good Christians

should only look to the Bible for instruction about salvation and how to live a good Christian life, what to think about God’s creation, and not to the pope, nor to any papal proclamations that had ever been made about Christian belief,

and, in regions of Europe, then, where Protestantism took a firm hold, so, for instance, that would be England, parts of Switzerland, Scotland, all throughout northern Germany, Denmark, Poland, the Scandinavian countries, all of those areas adopted

Protestantism relatively early in the 1500s, and accepted the idea that the proclamations of the Pope and his officials were to be discarded and ignored. And then, most importantly for supporters of the Copernican universe, Protestantism

provided no centralized, and still doesn’t, no centralized religious hierarchy that’s recognized as having authority to pass judgement on new ideas, especially new ideas emerging about nature and the cosmos.

Thus, scientific thinkers in Protestant areas were able to openly express their support for the Copernican theory, and openly teach it as a physical reality, without fear of persecution from any religious officials

within the Protestant sphere of Europe. But it was not solely the Copernican system that gained special traction because of the advent of Protestantism. We find that the thinker Francis Bacon, who is considered

to be the founder of the idea of a scientific method, he was influenced by a strain of Protestantism that emphasized that there was a dramatic transformation on the horizon in the Christian world, a transformation that was coming very soon,

and that this transformation would bring about a much improved, more spiritual, more perfect society, and this was the mindset, for instance, of the Puritans, who, to some extent, were trying to usher in that transformation, by moving to the New World.

But Bacon insisted that this transformation would also bring about a transformation in our knowledge about the natural world, and thus he decided to pursue, or felt compelled to pursue new ways

of investigating the natural world and introduce the very basics of the scientific method, under the influence of this Protestant Millenarianism, as it’s called, that did not exist in Catholic areas. So, it’s evident that

religious and social movements, as well as political issues, which I haven’t even talked about, could and still do have an impact upon the development and spread of new scientific ideas. Okay, let’s look at my third myth; that new discoveries

in medicine and biology lagged behind discoveries in astronomy and physics during the Scientific Revolution. It’s been my impression and I certainly understand this myth, that, usually, when the Scientific

Revolution is discussed Copernicus’s breakthroughs, and Galileo’s breakthroughs are the first new ideas that come up, and a discussion about how revolutionary they were is what’s usually associated then with the Scientific

Revolution, but this isn’t fair, it’s not accurate. At the same time that Copernicus was working on this new understanding of the heavens, there were several natural philosophers who were challenging the Ancient Greek and Roman

teachings about medicine and anatomy and making breakthroughs in those areas. For instance, Andreas Vesalius. In the same year that Copernicus’s work was published, Vesalius published a work called “On the Fabric

of the Human Body. ” And this is just one image from it, in which he makes it clear that he had been spending a decade or more carefully dissecting and analyzing human anatomy, and was coming up with

a much more accurate understanding of how the human body worked, than had been the case ever before. At the same time, a friend of his, by the name of Gabriele Falloppio was dissecting animals, and observed.

. . And he was deliberately trying to understand reproduction at all levels of life, and first dissected chickens, and found evidence of Fallopian tubes. He then dissected

other animals and found the same evidence, and then, finally, found Fallopian tubes in human women, adding to our knowledge about how reproduction worked. At the same time, or very soon after, Copernicus and his ideas about astronomy

and mathematics were taking place. Another thinker from slightly later was the natural philosopher William Harvey, who took on the ancient thinker Galen’s arguments about how blood moved through the body,

and he, in 1628, finally published his findings that convinced people that blood moved through the heart, and veins, came back up through the lungs, and then went back to the heart, but adding to our understanding, again,

of an area of biology, medicine, anatomy. We also have the great thinker Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who, in the late 1600s, playing with optics, perfected a microscope, and, of course, turned it at the small

world, and discovered, for instance, single-celled organisms, which he called animalcules. He was the first person to observe bacteria and to make notations about how bacteria lived and thrived. He analyzed plants and, interestingly,

analyzed spermatozoa, or discovered spermatozoa, all with microscopes that were incredibly good at magnifying. He came up with drawings, for instance, of bee stings, fungus, human louse,

and began publishing his findings in 1674. Among the things he ended up ultimately doing, then, is arguing that, because he had managed to observe very closely the life cycles of maggots and fleas, he was able to argue that maggots and fleas

were indeed actually born or generated from other animals like them, and that they did not spontaneously generate, which was the belief that was dominant before that. He also added to our understanding of anatomy by discovering

lymphatic capillaries, adding again to knowledge outside of the world of physics. Okay, and then, Robert Hooke did a lot of work also with a microscope, and first turned the microscope at cork, and discovered these little

tiny, what he called, cells, and coined the term “cell,” adding, again, to our collection of knowledge about what we today would term “biology. ” Here’s the forth myth, that the thinkers

behind the Scientific Revolution disdained the use of mysticism and spirituality in pursuing new knowledge about the natural world. It’s been my sense that people assume that because Galileo, Copernicus, Newton

are associated with being mathematicians, and using logic and painstaking observation, that we assume that they were cold, rational studiers of the natural world, but we find out that even such great thinkers were motivated by irrational

mindsets, associated with mysticism and spirituality. Thinkers like Kepler and Newton believed that the cosmos was truly alive, animate, that it had a soul, and that this soul or spirit pervaded all aspects of the

cosmos, and that one explanation for movement in the natural world was that the inner soul of objects were somehow consciously almost moving and seeking their rest, even if it was simply inanimate objects, or

things like the planets. For instance, Kepler, remember, the mathematician who worked out mathematically that the planets move in ellipses, thus, finally making the Copernican universe perfectly mathematically accurate, argued that or stated that,

to him, the Copernican system, that within the Copernican system there existed a splendid harmony that mystically demonstrated the truth of the Holy Trinity. He argued that the Sun represented God, the Father, that the fixed stars represented Christ, the Son,

and that the intermediate space stood for the Holy Ghost. And he believed, then, that there was a single motive force that governed planetary motions, and he called this force “anima motrix,” or a moving spirit, and that this moving spirit was

propelled by a kind of harmony that existed among the spheres, among the heavens, based upon some pure numerical relationship that had ratios that corresponded to musical ratios, so that Kepler came up with the idea that

one could actually notate like music the ratios of the distances of the planets from each other, and he, indeed, wrote a work called The Harmony of the Spheres, which contained an actual kind of musical score that helped explain or

illustrate how the planets moved. He also believed that we could better understand how the planets moved by referring back to the five Platonic solids of Plato, and that the way you placed those solids into each

other, on the left, represented the ratio between the planets. Even Isaac Newton believed that space is filled with spirit, a spirit that acts upon matter, and Newton accepted the existence of occult forces in nature.

He believed that these forces had been referred to by the ancient wise ones and Newton used this belief in these forces, these hidden forces at work, he used this idea to work with, without really worrying a whole lot about the ultimate causes,

he simply accepted their existence. He hoped that by finally understanding and explaining the movements of the planets, as well as the movements of objects on Earth, he might finally catch a glimpse of the divine

truth that permeated the universe, and that had been placed there, in Newton’s opinion, by God. There’s Newton at the young and dashing age of 45. And William Gilbert, you may know, is the individual who’s credited with working

with magnetism and understanding or explaining its role in the rotation of the Earth. To William Gilbert, magnetism was an incorporeal force that was the primal energy of nature. He said that magnetism was, as he said, the soul of the Earth,

because Gilbert also saw nature as being alive through and through, and Gilbert argued or stated that the Earth revolved because of its magnetic soul. Okay, let’s move on to the fifth myth; that the alchemists of the Scientific Revolution

were solely interested in finding a way to transform lead into gold. I think alchemy sometimes gets a bad rap these days. To many people, the idea that one can take a base metal and turn it into gold sound silly and absurd. So, many people today

assume that the people of the 16th century and even before that who devoted their time and energy to finding or making an elixir or substance that could change various substances into gold were somehow

delusional or obtuse, but it’s important to remember that such thinkers were pursuing the goal of turning base metals into gold before it was known that gold was an element. They didn’t yet know that it couldn’t be broken down any farther,

and they noted that gold and silver, if you will, grew inside the Earth, and that the elements or substances inside the Earth were combined and recombined by nature to produce gold, silver, et cetera,

and that, just as things like bronze were combinations of different elements that could be separated from each other, they believed that, perhaps, gold and silver were also made up of substances that could be broken down,

and that, if they could figure out what the substances were that made up gold, they could go find those substances, put them together, and make gold. So, alchemists did spend a lot of their time heating substances and watching what happened,

adding acids to substances to see what happened to them, how they broke down, taking those things produced by heating or acids and combining them together to see what came out of this, and it was not really, for really devout alchemists,

it wasn’t for the purpose of finding how to turn lead into gold, it was simply in order to learn the nature of substances, to learn what they were made of. They chose gold because it did seem to have magical properties,

and they hoped that, if they could figure out how this sort of magical gold, it doesn’t dissolve in nitric acid, it can be combined with silver, mercury, and other things, and then, through various laboratory measures removed from what it

had been combined with, et cetera, making it, as I said, look almost magical, and many alchemists did think that, if they could figure out what gold was made of, that they would get, again, a kind of glimpse into the mind of God, a glimpse into the

mind of the Creator, and come to a better understanding about how all of nature worked. One of the better known alchemists, if you will, of the, again, early and mid 1500s was a Swiss physician by the name of Paracelsus.

I just thought I’d give you images of alchemy laboratories, always a furnace to heat things up very hot, hotter than substances were used to experiencing, various jars, tools. Here’s an alchemy lab of the late 1600s,

with some of the strange-looking tools that we associate, perhaps, a little more with alchemy. I guess Paracelsus I’m not going to be able to get you his name there, but his name was spelled much like it sounds. He died in 1541,

and, to him, alchemy was a way to identify the chemicals contained in the human body, and then, to use that knowledge of those chemicals to create medicines, medicines that would produce health or maintain health.

And he believed that God wanted human beings to investigate the physical nature of the human body, in order to understand God’s creation better. To Paracelsus, the true physician must be an alchemist who, in his laboratory, would manipulate

the forces of the heavens that acted upon metals and, by doing so, come up with a kind of universal medicine from the knowledge he acquired by looking into the substance, the makeup of nature. He, indeed, proclaimed all changes in the body

should be understood through chemicals, and diseases are to be treated with chemicals. He insisted that the human body is a chemical factory, as is all of nature, and thus, using alchemy or, at least,

the tools of alchemy to better understand what substances were made of, was, if you will, to Paracelsus, doing God’s work, using our God-given intelligence to better understand the magnificence of God’s creation.

So, I’ve chosen to address these five myths, or maybe misperceptions is a better word? and, hopefully, gone at least a little way towards dispelling a lot of the false beliefs I fear many people have about the breakthroughs

that occurred during the Scientific Revolution, and, perhaps, come to a better understanding of the impact of social and religious events, even mysticism, upon scientific discoveries. And, most of all, as a historian,

my hope is simply to get people to acquire an accurate understanding of the events of the 16th and 17th century. So, I’ll end it there. (audience applauds) Thank you.