Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

Since the fourteenth century there had been an increasing number of thinkers who warned against blind faith in old authority, be it religious doctrine or the natural philosophy of Aristotle. There were also warnings against the belief that problems can be solved purely by thinking. An exaggerated belief in the importance of reason had been valid all through the Middle Ages. Now it was said that every investigation of natural phenomena must be based on observation, experience, and experiment. We call this the empirical method.’ ‘Which means?’ ‘It only means that one bases one’s knowledge of things on one’s own experience – and not on dusty parchments or figments of the imagination. Empirical science was known in antiquity, but systematic experiments were something quite new.’ ‘I guess they didn’t have any of the technical apparatus we have today.’ ‘Of course they had neither calculators nor electronic scales. But they had mathematics and they had scales. And it was now above all imperative to express scientific observations in precise mathematical terms. “Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured,” said the Italian Galileo Galilei, who was one of the most important scientists of the seventeenth century. He also said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’

The birth of empirical science during renaissance