The Scientific Revolution in Europe and its Impact on Chinese Cosmology during the 16th-18th Centuries

Abstract

The scientific revolution, which developed in Western Europe during the 16th-18th centuries, was one of the most significant fruits of the activity of European universities. The cultural movement of Renaissance, born in Italy a century earlier, which moved the center of attention of scholars on man, ‘blacksmith of his destiny’ and on his dignity, with a marked curiosity for the laws of nature, greatly contributed to it. Another propulsive factor were the maritime expeditions across the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, promoted by the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain at the end of the ‘Reconquista’, between the 15th and the 16th centuries. Their vessels crossed the Equator Line, discovering new lands and new skies. Celestial Mechanics was at the center of that peaceful revolution, owing to the initiative of scholars as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton. The Jesuit missionaries, sent to China by the Roman Catholic Church with evangelizing purposes, propagated among the scholars of the imperial court the use of the astronomical telescope and the adoption of the experimental method in science. Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Church condemned in the same years the propagation of the heliocentric theory, because it contradicted the Bible, of which the Church considered to be its exclusive interpreter. This was a hindrance to the advancement of modern Celestial Mechanics in the Far East, until the Church ceased to obstruct the heliocentric theory toward the middle of the 18th century. It took another century for that theory to be fully accepted by Chinese scholars.