Ideas about human society, government, religion and culture began to be questioned. It was not only in science that reason and close observation triumphed over ignorance and unquestioned tradition. The Scientific Revolution is another topic which will be covered in AP® World History, and one which you will need to understand before you move on to the Enlightenment period. The men of the Scientific Revolution questioned everything, and to do this, they observed, measured, experimented and formulated hypotheses and theories about why things were the way they were, and set about proving or disproving their hypotheses, or the ideas of the ages. To do this, they devised new methods of calculation and measurement, and perhaps more importantly, they introduced what we know as the “Scientific Method.” For centuries, humans had taken as absolute truth that which they appeared to see and perceive, and that which had been passed down to them from prior generations – without dispute. Starting in the late 1500’s, men like Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, and others began to explain to mankind the nature of both the seen and the unseen universe. Medicine was primitive, people’s idea of the universe was very limited and restricted by religious belief, man’s idea of how nature functioned was limited by superstition and fear, and human beings did not even have a basic understanding of how and what they breathed, how they saw or heard, or what ideas or tools were necessary to figure these puzzles out. This period of great change is known as the “Scientific Revolution.” For centuries, mankind had been progressing, but very slowly – especially in the area of science. Here’s an AP® World History crash course on the Enlightenment. An important concept and period covered in AP® World History is the Enlightenment.
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