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.

Where shall we set the beginning of modern skepticism? As we have seen, the modern skeptical movement can trace its roots back to David Hume and René Descartes in the Enlightenment. Francis Bacon, a courtier in the court of King Henry VIII, could be called a skeptic. We could also look at many important skeptics in the nineteenth century, such as Herbert Spencer, and early twentieth century skeptics such as Harry Houdini (1980). Later on we will look at one of these early skeptics, William Clifford. However, most modern skeptics regard a clear and simple sequence of events as marking the founding of the modern movement.

The key event is the publication in 1952 of a book by the polymath writer Martin Gardner, titled In the Name of Science. The book did not sell well in its original incarnation, but it was reissued in 1957 under a different title, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Gardner 1957) and it has remained in print ever since. Half a century later, its contents are intriguing, and we will review them in a moment.

By itself, Gardner's book made little perceptible difference. However, in 1975 a statement appeared in Science News titled ‘Objections to Astrology’ (Bok et al 1975), signed by a number of Nobel Prize winning scientists. The following year a conference was held in Buffalo, New York, on ‘The New Irrationalisms: Antiscience and Pseudoscience’.

You may feel a little cheated by the subject of this chapter. Isn't this book about investigating the paranormal? Why should we spend a whole chapter looking at science? There are at least two compelling answers. First, both the paranormal and skepticism are defined in terms of science: we will see this in Chapters two and three. Without some understanding of science, the other key terms will make no sense. Second, many paranormal practitioners argue that they are in fact doing science. Others are fiercely opposed to the idea. Science is simply too important to be ignored, and we need to know how it works.

What is science? For centuries, philosophers have tried to work out exactly how scientific knowledge differs from other types of knowledge. In general, the attempts have failed. Alan Chalmers (1988) has written a good summary of the major attempts. In this chapter we will outline a couple of simple models of science. In turn, these will enable us to understand some key points about both skepticism and the paranormal.

We might start with the views of one of the greatest scientists of all time. Albert Einstein summarised the entire goal of science in a single sentence: ‘The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.’ (Calaprice 1996, p. 178).

Let us unpick this concise statement a bit more, as it tells us a great deal.