The question is incomplete but I have the entire one:
Which practice was more likely to be accepted after the scientific revolution than before?
A. Scientists deriving much of their knowledge from the Bible
B. Scientists claiming that the Earth was at the center of the solar
system
C. Scientists challenging traditional beliefs about the way the
universe works
D. Scientists attending universities controlled by the Catholic Church
Answer:
B). Scientists claiming that the Earth was at the center of the solar system.
What was revolutionary about the Scientific Revolution? How did the study of nature in the 16th century differ from the study of nature in the Middle Ages?
Disclaimer: I can only write with confidence about paradigm shifts between medieval and Renaissance alchemy.
Here's what Robert Boyle wrote in The Sceptical Chymist (1661):
And, to prevent mistakes, I must advertize you, that I now mean by elements, as those chymists that speak plainest do by their principles, certain primitive or simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those called perfectly mixt bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved: now whether there be any such body to be constantly met with in all, and each, of those that are said to be elemented bodies, is the thing I now question.
[Note: I realize this is not from the 16th Century, but the 16th Century is just too soon if you want solid answers about the differences you are inquiring about.]
Bear with me here because this might get a bit out of hand.
In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault explains in great detail what he refers to as the "medical gaze" of the 19th Century. According to Foucault, the "medical gaze" was a state of mind in which physicians at the time were able to "gaze" upon any number of patients and read and interpret the various signs in order to determine the symptoms.
For example, let's say two patients have pneumonia, but one patient coughs violently whereas the other patient simply wheezes. Both possess the symptom of fluid in the lungs, but the signs are completely different.
For Foucault, the "medical gaze" represents a newfound perception of nature anticipating the advent of what we now call structural linguistics. In structural linguistics, language consists of two elements--the sign and the signified, where the sign is the symbol or word on the page and the signified is the meaning. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, the sign is completely arbitrary: we agree to call red "red", but we could just as easily agree to call red "farfignuggen" and none would be the wiser.
So the signified is static, but the sign can be dynamic. This is the crux of the "medical gaze": regardless of how many different signs there are (coughing, wheezing, heaving breathing), the physician can still read and interpret those signs in order to determine the symptom (fluid in the lungs). The signs are dynamic, the symptom is static.
Now let's answer your question.
Up until Robert Boyle wrote The Sceptical Chymist, alchemists approached nature the same way physicians approached symptoms in the 19th Century.
During the Middle Ages, every aspect of nature--from wood to metal to the planets themselves--consisted of two opposing elements, Mercury and Sulphur. The problem is that the signs alchemists used to signify those elements changed as if based on the time of day. For one alchemist, Mercury was a woman bearing buckets of water from a well. For another, Mercury was a green lion. For others, Mercury was simply Quicksilver. The element remained the same (for the most part) all the way into the Renaissance, but the signs (woman with water, green lion, quicksilver, etc) changed constantly.
While the signs of symptoms changed based on patients' immune systems, the signs of Mercury changed based on which alchemist was writing about Mercury.
And while Foucault called attention to the "medical gaze" of the 19th Century, one could just as easily call attention to an "alchemist's gaze" of the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.
Robert Boyle changed all of that. He came out and he said, "Forget this fickleness! We need one sign and one sign only. And we need to agree! No more calling this element by ten different names. No more correspondence systems. We need to agree and we need to do it now."
Of course, I am paraphrasing in a rather silly way, but that's the gist of what he meant when he wrote the passage I quoted at the beginning. What eventually became a rising trend in medicine was an old trend in alchemy that needed to be quashed for completely different reasons.
So it's not a matter of how the 16th Century differed from the Middle Ages, but how the Late Renaissance called an end to the fickleness of the Natural Philosophy that preceded it.
