Even as the Wars of Religion raged, science made rapid advances. The Scientific Revolution was a roughly two-hundred-year period of staggering advances in science and mathematics that began with Copernicus (1473–1543), who showed that the earth was not the fixed center of Creation, and ended with Newton (1642–1727), whose breakthrough discoveries laid the foundation for modern physics. The era overturned the Aristotelian-Christian cosmos—a hierarchical model of reality in which all things exist organically through their relationship to God—in favor of a mechanical universe ordered by laws of
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