The Scientific Revolution is a rather loose phrase historians use to describe a profound change in intellectual thought in the 16th and 17th centuries. This change, along with the discovery of the New World and the religious transformation of Europe, forms the dividing line between the medieval world and the early modern world. The New World and the Reformation belong mainly to the earlier 16th century, so in a sense the Scientific Revolution, completes the change.
Scientific Method
For centuries, people based their beliefs on their interpretations of what they saw going on in the world around them without testing their ideas to determine the validity of these theories, in other words, they didn’t use the scientific method to arrive at answers to their questions. Rather, their conclusions were based on untested observations.
Among these ideas, since at least the time of Aristotle, people believed that simple living organisms could come into being by spontaneous generation. This was the idea that non-living objects can give rise to living organisms. It was common “knowledge” that simple organisms like worms, beetles, frogs, amd salamanders could come from dust, mud, etc, and food left out, quickly “swarmed” with life.
