Important advancements were made in physical and life science during this period …show more content…
He was born in 1473 in Toruń in northern Poland to a family of five. From the time Nicolaus Copernicus was young it was clear that he was interested in science and mathematics. This passion drove Copernicus to make many discoveries through the duration of his life. He went against the commonly thought idea that the Earth was stationary. He instead suggested instead that we lived in a heliocentric planetary system. This means the sun is at the center of the universe rather than the common idea that the planets revolved around Earth . The laws that were once seemed to only be applicable to “space” were now seen as applicable to Earth and the things on it. One error that Copernicus made was thinking that the planets orbited in a circular motion when instead they orbited in an elliptical motion around the sun. Although there was a lack of compelling reasons at the time, Copernicus continued to believe that he had the correct ideas. (Ren & Ref) He helped the basic mathematical structure be understood by many people of that time period. Copernicus’s work served as a foundation for other philosophers to add …show more content…
Methodology pertaining to nature arose during this period. This methodology was characterized by three different things. The first was the emphasis on the mathematical properties that were beneath what was going on physically in nature. Philosophers began to dig deeper into why the things we could see were happening and what they were caused by. The second was a tendency to explain why events occurred in terms of properties and their relationships. This means that they would attempt to give the reasons that different properties reacted to one another in the ways that they did. Lastly, the last category was a method of hypothesis that helped make the experiment more simple. The method of hypothesis was to discover the laws restricting the properties of extended matter. They used these methods to differentiate between primary properties from the secondary properties. The primary properties being the aspects of an object that you could see and the secondary properties being the things you couldn’t see on the object but the way the objects affected