When the early models of the spyglass appeared in Holland, Europeans quickly recognized the importance of the new device for both military reconnaissance and celestial exploration. Shortly thereafter, missionaries, sea captains, and traders began taking the telescope around the world, first across Europe and then to Asia. In 1615, the British ambassador Sir Thomas Roe presented a telescope to the Mughal court of Jahangir. This occurred in the same year as Chinese scholars could read a preliminary account of Galileo's discoveries written in Chinese.

Mughal India

When Europeans began exploring India in the late sixteenth century, and more extensively in the early seventeenth century, they were stunned by the amount of wealth that was in the hands of the rulers of Mughal India. As one British official put it, Sultan Jahangir was “the greatest and richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth.” Others noted the great disparity of wealth and power between Jahangir and “Christian kings,” saying that it was so great as to be “incredible.”

Until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the rise of globalization, societies and civilizations of the past were deeply rooted in their local cultures and traditions. This was especially so with regard to their practices of socialization and education. The educational traditions of Europe stood far from those of the Muslim Middle East and from those of China and Mughal India. Educational practices are always deeply embedded in religious and philosophical traditions, and those traditions in China, India, and Europe were considerably different.

Although Islam spread in many areas that had once been Christian, Islamic philosophy and institutional practices stand in contrast to Christian conceptions. Christianity from the outset had been deeply influenced by Greek philosophy and Hellenic culture that still survived at the time of Christ. On the other hand, when Islam arose, Hellenic culture had virtually disappeared. Furthermore, the Arabian peninsula had never been significantly penetrated by either Greek or Roman culture. Consequently, the metaphysical and philosophical foundations of the two civilizations were markedly different. Even though there was an impressive translation movement of the eighth and ninth centuries that brought a huge stock of Greek philosophy into Arab areas, differences in attitudes to the natural philosophy of Plato and Aristotle remained.

In the 1630s, when the official debate over Galileo's provocative defense of the Copernican system was starting to heat up again, physical inquiry began shifting its focus to another part of the natural world. It concerned hydraulics, the limitations of siphons and suction pumps to lift water, and the idea that the air of our atmosphere has weight. If true, that idea would have momentous implications for human life. Within seventy years, Europeans would be pioneering the effort to harness that principle of nature as a new source of energy. First steam power and soon thereafter electric power would follow.

Such technological advances could only be harvested by advances in basic science itself. Furthermore, each of these inquiries was rooted in ancient conceptions that had been studied continuously from the time of Aristotle. In the early 1600s, Italy was a leader in hydraulics and in the construction of mechanical devices for lifting water. Some of these mechanical devices were also used to power machines for the grinding and processing of other materials. Vittorio Zonca (b. ca. 1580) had published a book in 1607 with dozens of illustrations of such devices, some powered by water, some by beasts, and some by human agents. It went through many editions. Consequently, Rome had a band of hydraulics experts in the 1630s experimenting with various hydraulic devices. They found the question of why water can be raised hydraulically only ten meters needing an explanation. This problem was mysteriously linked to the question of a vacuum.

During the year following the publication of the Starry Messenger, Galileo was thrown into a maelstrom of argument, debate, and more discoveries. Those without principled reasons for opposing Galileo's discoveries were enchanted and began to imagine all kinds of new things. An English astronomer, Sir William Lower, who had been a student of Thomas Harriot's, reacted enthusiastically to Galileo's news. He wrote to Harriot on June 21, 1610, “We are here…on fire with these things.” For him, Galileo's discoveries were more startling than Magellan's trip around the world. He and Harriot both wondered whether the planets Saturn and Mars might have hitherto unseen moons revolving around them. They were right: both do have satellites, but they would not be found for many years.

Becoming Mathematician and Philosopher

Galileo now pressed forward with his plan to become mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. With his new book of discoveries in hand and his improved occhiale, Galileo had much with which to impress the grand duke.

Before we look at the new synthesis of astronomy, the science of mechanics, and other forces, we should recall the scientific context outside Europe, especially in the Muslim world, regarding astronomy and the science of motion.

Earlier, in Chapter 5, I outlined developments in optics, astronomy, and the science of motion in the Muslim world up to the end of the seventeenth century. We saw that when the telescope arrived in Mughal India (1615), in the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1630), and the broader Middle East, there was no response triggering an upsurge in astronomical activity. No new telescopes were designed, no new observatories were built, and no new astronomical observations were compiled using the telescope.

Those who think about the long cycles of science and civilizations and the question of why the Western world succeeded as it did may need to anchor their speculations in several mundane facts. When the scientific revolution occurred in the seventeenth century, the United States of America did not yet exist. In 1609, when Galileo made his revolutionary telescopic discoveries, a hardy band of English settlers attempted to establish the Popham Colony on the forbidding coast of Maine. Owing to the harsh winters of New England, the ill-fated colony was gone a year later.

In 1776, when the thirteen colonies banded together to form the United States, the inhabitants of those often wilderness regions numbered perhaps six million. China and India at the time counted more than 100 million subjects each, dwarfing the population of the struggling American colonies. No one would have predicted that the educational, political, and economic institutions being fashioned in those embryonic United States would propel it to become the dominant power in the twentieth century.

The Revolutionary Grand Synthesis

The achievement of the modern scientific revolution, most elegantly put forth in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, was the outcome of a joint European adventure. It brought together extraordinary advances in optics, astronomy, and the science of motion, all governed by the law of universal gravitation. Whether we consider Newton's new unified system of terrestrial and celestial physics of 1687, or his even grander vision of that system augmented by particle attractions, magnetic, electric, and other forces acting “at a great distance,” the result is undeniably revolutionary.

The seventeenth century also witnessed great strides in pneumatics and electrical studies: advances in the former field would bring the steam engine, whereas those in the latter would bring electrification and an unimaginable new source of energy: electric power. It is difficult to imagine the Industrial Revolution without steam power and our modern digital world without electricity and its harnessing. Neither could any other part of the world get us there without first discovering and harnessing electric forces.

The seventeenth century was one of the most dynamic and eventful centuries in the history of the modern world. It can be called the great divide that separated Western Europe developmentally from the rest of the world for the next three and a half centuries. During the 100 years of the seventeenth century, the scientific revolution in Europe produced an enormous flow of discoveries that transformed scientific thought. These discoveries occurred in astronomy, optics, the science of motion, mathematics, and the newly created field of physics. The Newtonian synthesis brought forth for the first time an integrated celestial and terrestrial physics within the framework of universal gravitation. Advances were also made in hydraulics and pneumatics, medicine, microscopy, and the study of human and animal anatomy. Not least of all, big steps were taken toward the discovery of electricity.

Given this extraordinary pattern of discovery, it is easy to ask why all this did not happen elsewhere. Simply put, why the West? Why did the Western world take off and become the dominant scientific, economic, and political power on this planet? Why did the great civilizations of China, India, and the Muslim Middle East, with their long records of growth and accomplishment, fall behind? Today, the prevailing view is that whatever happened culturally and developmentally in the West must have taken place elsewhere because people are basically the same in all places. The sociologist and medieval historian Benjamin Nelson called this idea uniformitarianism.

Across the world in 1600, the night sky was a spectacular array of bright stars. Before the invention of electricity and other forms of lighting, to step out into the air on a clear night was to enter into a wonderland of starry objects filling the sky in all directions. This was as true in Europe or North America as it was in India, Africa, or China. The sky was filled with thousands of fixed stars that appeared to be attached to a blue background that rotated daily around the earth. Against that tapestry, the five planets – Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn – followed their regular paths, tracked by their proximity to constellations among the fixed stars.

In the lucidity of this unpolluted sky, the nighttime observer was likely to see shooting stars that had their own mystical significance. Even today, if one goes outside the dense urban areas of our planet, where most people live, that dazzling vista can be seen. In the rural parts of our world, for example, in northern Maine or other parts of New England, or southern France, in the mountains and villages north of Aix-en-Provence, or in rural Tunisia, among many other places, the vast array of stellar objects visible to the naked eye suddenly comes into view. For today's urban dwellers, this is a wondrous experience.

Given the extraordinary achievements seen in the scientific revolution and the huge cultural and technological advantages that those advances conferred on the Western world, it is surprising that so little has been written about it by those concerned with economic development. Major writers who have claimed either the parity or superiority of China to the West economically prior to the eighteenth century have been almost entirely silent about the European scientific revolution, its long history, and its significance.

If we credit Herbert Butterfield's claim set out in the introduction to this study, then it is clear, as the last chapter has shown, that there was a great transformation of thought regarding our understanding of the forces governing the natural world. That mental transformation uniquely unfolded in the West during the last phases of the scientific revolution. This means that Max Weber's question about “what combination of circumstances” were responsible for the great ascendance of the West must include those of the revolutionary new scientific point of view that infused the whole gamut of seventeenth-century natural scientific inquiry, not just astronomy. Put differently, the question of why the West can only be answered by bringing together the great conceptual transformation of the scientific revolution and the effects of the Protestant Reformation that had been noted by Weber. That path of cultural synthesis must consider the facilitating effects of religion along with the emergence of the new print media, the crystallization of a public sphere, and the rising rates of literacy. Indeed, as a sociological factor, the unparalleled rising rates of literacy in Europe were a major contributor to the great ascendance and divergence that set Europe off socially and economically from other parts of the world. Furthermore, the rise of literacy in Europe must be traced back at least to the early sixteenth century, when there was no parallel development in China, Asia broadly, or the Muslim world. At the same time, those developments have to be read against the long developmental background from the late Middle Ages.

As astronomy went through its revolutionary transformation from the time of Copernicus to Newton, the ground shifted from mathematical modeling to deep probings of the structures of the universe. We have seen already that seventeenth-century European natural philosophers had stumbled onto the mysterious forces of magnetism and electricity. Solving the problem of the orbits of the planets was not just a mathematical problem based on observational parameters for the seven planets. Sooner or later, astronomers would be released from the confines of geometry to the soaring world of philosophers of the universe such as Galileo wished to be. That meant grasping the forces of nature, both large and small.

Philosophers of the Universe

This was to be the new age of cosmology. Inevitably, it required working toward a unified science of terrestrial and celestial physics. Kepler was the first of these new philosophers of the universe to propose a new astronomy based on physical causes, something missing from Copernicus's great work. Yet, even he did not envision a unified terrestrial and celestial physics, as Newton did. He had a grand vision for the shape of astronomy based on physical causes, but just what that meant in Kepler's time, nobody could say. He laid out that vision in an insight from 1605 that was not published until the appearance of his New Astronomy of 1609:

To propose a machinelike universe animated by a single force was audacious. Galileo was a committed Copernican, and his extraordinary visual exploration of the heavens using the telescope yielded the discovery of the cratered surface of the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus, all of which supported the Copernican hypothesis as he saw it. Yet, he did not have a grander vision of celestial physics beyond the success of the Copernican system.

The ideas about magnetism and electricity that began to be widely discussed by natural philosophers at the outset of the seventeenth century take us deep into the mysteries of the fundamental forces of nature. Even at the end of the twentieth century, this part of modern physics had many unanswered questions, including just how to think about the four basic forces of nature: strong, weak, gravitational, and electromagnetic. Today, perhaps electric and magnetic forces seem the simplest to comprehend, but in 1600, no one had even imagined the existence of “electricity.” William Gilbert stumbled onto it while divining the nature of magnetism. Only that innovation paved the way for the continuous study of electric forces throughout the seventeenth century. In the meantime, astronomy was about to be transformed from mere mathematical model-building to philosophical speculation about just what holds our universe together. But before we can approach that great intellectual struggle, we need to consider the discovery of the more subtle forces that bind our world, and that began to be glimpsed in the early seventeenth century.

Holding the World Together

The question of what holds the planets in their orbits was abruptly brought into focus in the late sixteenth century. In 1577, a comet appeared in Europe, seen by many observers, but especially Tycho Brahe. He was then the most accomplished European astronomer. He noticed that the path of the comet was such that it would have crashed through the crystalline spheres that were supposed to hold the planets and fixed stars in their orbits. If this comet on a path through a crystalline sphere did not cause a crash, then those spheres vanished. If the crystalline heavenly spheres were gone from the universe and therefore could not explain why the planets and fixed stars continued in their daily and yearly paths, then cosmological thinkers had to ask themselves if there is not some intrinsic force in nature that attracts objects to each other. This was the deeper background to Kepler's thinking in 1605.