ABSTRACT
The historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin opened his widely acclaimed book The Scientific Revolution with the words: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it”. He went on to write:
Some time ago [ … ] historians announced the real existence of a coherent, cataclysmic, and climactic event that fundamentally and irrevocably changed what people knew about the natural world and how they secured knowledge of it. It was the moment at which the world was made modern, it was a Good Thing, and it happened sometime during the period from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. It was, of course, the Scientific Revolution.
(Shapin, 1996, p.1)