Reading the Universe

Galileo once remarked that the Bible, which lights the road to heaven, does not say much on how the heavens work. The point was sharp: scripture tells you how to reach God, not how the planets move. The thinkers of this period insisted that knowledge, as distinct from belief, had to rest on observation and experiment. Once they had shown the way, investigation into what came to be called physics, chemistry and biology expanded rapidly. Historians later gave this new approach to the knowledge of man and nature a name — the Scientific Revolution.

The consequences were profound. In the minds of sceptics and non-believers, God began to be replaced by Nature as the source of creation. Even those who kept their faith started speaking of a distant God, one who does not directly regulate the act of living in the material world. The universe was no longer a stage where divine will acted at every moment; it was a system that ran by its own laws.

These ideas did not stay locked in private study. They were popularised through scientific societies, which established a new scientific culture in the public domain. Two institutions stand out:

• The Paris Academy, established in 1670.
• The Royal Society in London for the promotion of natural knowledge, formed in 1662. …