Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/471

The Wars of Religion 347 VI. THE BEGINNINGS OF OUR SCIENTIFIC AGE 592. The New Science. The battles of the Thirty Years' War are now well-nigh forgotten, and few people are interested in Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus. It seems as if the war did little but destroy men's lives and property, and that no great ends were accomplished by all the suffering it involved. But during the years that it raged certain men were quietly devoting themselves to scientific research which was to change the world more than all the battles that have ever been fought. These men adopted a new method. They perceived that the books of ancient writers, especially Aristotle, which were used as textbooks in the universities, were full of statements that could not be proved. They maintained that the only way to advance science was to set to work and try experiments, and by careful thought and investi- gation to determine the laws of nature without regard to what previous generations had believed. 593. The Discovery of Copernicus. The Polish astronomer Copernicus published a work in 1543 in which he refuted the old idea that the sun and all the stars revolved around the earth as a center, as was then taught in all the universities. He showed that, on the contrary, the sun was the center about which the earth and the rest of the planets revolved, and that the reason that the stars seem to go around the earth each day is because our globe revolves on its axis. Although Copernicus had been en- couraged to write his book by a cardinal and had dedicated it to the Pope, the Catholic as well as the Protestant theologians de- clared that the new theory contradicted the teachings of the Bible, and they therefore rejected it. But we know now that Copernicus was right and the theologians and universities wrong. 594. Galileo. The Italian scientist Galileo (1564-1642), by the use of a little telescope he contrived, was able, in 1610, to see the spots on the sun ; these indicated that the sun was not, as Aristotle had taught, a perfect, unchanging body, and showed also that it revolved on its axis, as Copernicus had guessed that the earth did. Galileo made careful experiments by dropping