29th Annual Student Research Conference
Finite or Unbounded? How the "Scientific Revolution" has Changed
Corey Schmidt
Dr. David Robinson and Dr. Peter Ramberg, Faculty Mentors
Koyré, Kuhn, Jacob, Shapin. These people established and defined the Scientific Revolution. By the 1920s, scholars such as George Sarton and especially Alexandre Koyré had brought the term into our vocabulary and had given the 16th and 17th centuries a sense of firmness of place and mind. Thomas Kuhn unveiled the term "paradigm" in 1962 to help describe what he saw as the structures guiding not just the Scientific Revolution but all scientific revolutions. Margaret Jacob led the crusading cultural historians of the 1980s to examine the Scientific Revolution in the context of the societies of the times. "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution," Steven Shapin recently proposed, shockingly. These accounts of the meaning of the Scientific Revolution reveal the changing characteristics of the times when they were written; together, they give a broad perspective on changing notions of science itself in the modern world.
Keywords: Scientific Revolution, History of Science, Thomas Kuhn, Margaret Jacob, Steven Shapin
Topic(s):History Senior Seminar
History
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: -3
Location: MG 2090
Time: 10:00