WHEN Giordano Bruno gave a lecture on natural philosophy at the
University of Paris in 1585, his audience was so incensed at the
liberties he took with long-established principles that he had
to escape through a window. A century later, gentlemen were
meeting regularly to observe new experiments at the Royal
Society in London, under a constitution that banned them from
talking about religion or politics. They were doing science in a
way that would be familiar to anyone who has ever messed around
with springs and weights in a physics lesson. What happened in
between is normally called the scientific revolution.  It was a
strange kind of revolution; no one talked about it at the time.
Despite the neophyte titles of many contemporary works—Galileo
Galilei wrote the “Two New Sciences”, Johannes Kepler the “New
Astronomy” and Francis Bacon the “New Atlantis”—the idea that
there had been a scientific revolution in the 17th century did
not take hold until the 1930s. Even so, the term has prospered
as shorthand for a