Herbert Butterfield on Scientific revolution

“William Gilbert published a famous book on the magnet in 1600 and laid himself open to the gibes of Sir Francis Bacon for being one of those people so taken by their pet subject of research that they could only see the whole universe transposed into terms of it. Having made a spherical magnet called a terrella, and having found that it revolved when placed in a magnetic field, he decided that the whole earth was a magnet, that gravity was a form of magnetic attraction, and that the principles of the magnet accounted for the workings of the Copernican system as a whole. Kepler and Galileo were both influenced by this view, and with Kepler, it became an integral part of his system, a basis for the doctrine of almost universal gravitation.”

“[T]he supremely important field for the ordinary purposes of education... perhaps more in need of the intervention of the historian... is the so-called "scientific revolution," popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but reaching back in an unmistakably continuous line...much earlier still. Since the revolution overturned the authority in science not only in the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. Since it changed the character of men's habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself. It looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.”