You may have picked up on the fact that I’m a little uneasy with the term Scientific Revolution–big S, big R. Of course, some Very Big changes–big V, big B–took place in the early-modern era. Copernicus’s heliocentrism up here for one. But the question is: was it a specific moment of Revolution…or more of progressive sea-change in world view?
But I’ll leave that discussion to the pros. For the inquisitive, I recommend Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution. “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution,” he writes, “and this is a book about it.”