When did the »Copernican« Revolution become a Scientific Revolution?

Abstract

We have to distinguish between the scientific revolution which was bound to the work of Copernicus and the cultural-ideological changes that accompanied and framed this revolution. The »Copernican« revolution was in the beginning a constituent part of the cultural and ideological changes at the end of the Renaissance but it became a scientific revolution only with Galilei and Kepler. This was the first scientific revolution which inaugurated the internal dynamics of scientific development. A necessary condition of that revolution was the incorporation of consistent physical dynamics into astronomy. This happened with the formulation of Kepler’s laws and Galilei’s postulates on relative movements, and the law of inertia and free fall, which are valid for the entire physical universe.