Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society

by Bill Bryson

Why was such a shift occurring? After all, the medieval world picture had held stable as a philosophical construct for more than a thousand years. The telescope had not yet been invented, astronomical observations were not qualitatively better, the Ptolemaic model continued to yield reasonable results. Cosmological technologies were not perceived to be failing. So what was going on? Astronomy wasn’t undergoing a crisis, nonetheless underlying conceptions of how reality might be were beginning to change. We know this primarily not from what scientifically minded thinkers were saying but from what painters were doing. Long before the rise of science a new Western attitude to space was apparent in the realm of art, and to understand the cosmological transformation wrought by Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century it is instructive to turn first to the frescoes of Giotto. Here we can see explicitly the spiritual stakes that were coming into play as Europeans began to feel their way out of a medieval world.