Science Doesn’t Need to be this Way

Textbooks often describe the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century in triumphalist terms, glorying over the moment learning threw off the benighted shackles of the Church and Aristotle and stepped into a brave new world of truth. Posterity lauds the supposed winners of this paradigm shift—Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Newton—and derides the losers, figures like Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Athanasius Kircher, and Thomas Vaughan, all of whom persisted in affirming the participati...