1. See for example Laurence M. Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
2. Alexander Koyré, “Galileo and Plato,” Journal of the History Ideas 4, no. 4 (1943), 400–428.
3. Paulo Rossi, "Hermeticism, Rationality and the Scientific Revolution," in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), 248. English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, commenting nearly a century ago on the erosion of ancient wisdom and the attendant rise of modern science in his book Science and the Modern World (1925
4. New York: Mentor, 1948), 10, called the revolutionary transformations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science "the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir." For British historian Herbert Butterfield, the Scientific Revolution "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements.… 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." Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, rev. ed. (1949
5. New York: Free Press, 1965), 7-8.