ABSTRACT
Up to this point we have traced the development of various parts of the scientific method in many civilizations. We can think of this development as being a stream that flowed in countries around the Mediterranean and shifted to the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, with parallel but largely unrelated centers developing in places like China and the Americas. In this chapter we will trace the movement of that stream to a new location in northern Europe, which we have largely ignored up to this point. I will argue that from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries the scientific method in its fully developed modern form came on the scene in Europe, with the English scientist Isaac Newton being a good candidate for the title “First Modern Scientist.”
