Copernicus's Sun Kiss

Did the Scientific Revolution begin when Nicolas Copernicus both died and published his book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543?

It is odd to say that the Scientific Revolution is not fully “believed in” by many historians today. Some do not see it as a significant occurrence/event/happening/watershed in history.

What started and created the “modern world” that we live in? The Renaissance? The Scientific Revolution? The Enlightenment? The Industrial Revolution? Or, was it a combination of these?

The Scientific Revolution was a revolution in the truest and purest sense. It started with two major changes that turned our ‘world’ and our ‘cosmos’ inside out.

After many Greek philosophers prosed many ideas about the Earth and its ‘lands’ or geography and about the sky or cosmos, Ptolemy set up the standard views of both that lasted over a thousand years. With the Earth in the center of a reality made of nested-spheres, it was circled in perfect circles by the moon, Sun, planets, and the stars. The Earth was made three connected continents - Europa, Africa, and Asia - that were surrounded by the great ocean.

Then, Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Amerigo Vespucci decided that South America was a new continent. Mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller lead a team of cartographers to make and publish a new map of the world in 1507 that showed Vespucci’s new continent that he called ‘America.’

If there is another continent to the West of the ‘known world’ with another sea/ocean West of it - separating America from Asia - did it mean that the ‘map’ and understanding of the sky/cosmos and their accompanying maps were also wrong and incomplete?

These two transformations changed how we saw the Earth and the heavens in dramatical and fundamental ways.

Both realms turned inside-out.

The singular, centralizing three-continent world (Afro-Eurasia) surrounded by one sea/ocean was just NOT alone, not so central, and nor so nicely surrounded by this one sea.

Additionally, the sky became heliocentric (sun-centered) and eventual nearly infinite.

In a binary way of thinking, the world flipped. It took between 50 and 100 years for humanity to shift from the old modules to the new ones, but eventually they made it, and seeing ‘evidence’ became the norm for knowing. Observation became king. Empiricism ruled.

All future masters of the universe had to kiss the ring of observable evidence. Seeing is believing.