Natural Philosophy

What they called science before there was a word for it — and how the transition happened.

The term

In the 17th century, “scientist” didn’t exist as a word (it was coined by William Whewell in 1833). The people we now call scientists called themselves “natural philosophers” — investigators of the natural world through reason and observation. The distinction matters because it tells you what they thought they were doing: not a separate professional activity called “science” but a branch of philosophy concerned with nature rather than ethics or metaphysics.

The old way

Before the Scientific Revolution, understanding nature meant reading Aristotle. For over a thousand years, European scholars treated Aristotle’s writings on physics, biology, and cosmology as essentially settled. The sun went around the earth. Heavy objects fell faster than light ones. Fire rose because it sought its natural place. Knowledge came from authority and logical deduction from first principles, not from experiment.

The new way

Three men — cited by Enoch Root on page 21 as “light-bringers” — broke this:

• Francis Bacon (1561–1626) argued that knowledge should come from systematic observation and experiment, not from ancient texts. His Novum Organum (1620) laid out the empirical method. The Royal Society was founded explicitly on Baconian principles.
• Galileo (1564–1642) pointed a telescope at the sky and saw things Aristotle hadn’t predicted — mountains on the moon, moons around Jupiter, phases of Venus. He also dropped balls from towers (probably) and rolled them down inclined planes (definitely), demonstrating that Aristotle was wrong about falling bodies.
• René Descartes (1596–1650) argued that mathematics could describe all natural phenomena. His analytical geometry — the coordinate system that bears his name — gave natural philosophers a language precise enough to express physical laws.

The revolution in practice

What changed between roughly 1600 and 1700:

• Observation replaced authority. If Aristotle said heavy objects fall faster and your experiment showed they didn’t, the experiment won.
• Mathematics replaced verbal description. Instead of saying “the planets move in circles,” you wrote equations describing ellipses (Kepler) and calculated the forces producing them (Newton).
• Instruments extended the senses. Telescopes, microscopes, air pumps, barometers, thermometers, pendulum clocks — each opened a new domain of observation.
• Institutions organized the work. The Royal Society (1660), the Académie des Sciences (1666), and their networks of correspondence created a system for sharing, verifying, and building on results.

The novel’s central drama

Quicksilver is set at the exact moment this transition is happening — when alchemy and natural philosophy coexist in the same minds (Newton practiced both), when the old Aristotelian curriculum still dominates Cambridge while the new experimental philosophy is thriving in London’s coffeehouses, and when the boundary between superstition and science is being drawn for the first time. Daniel Waterhouse’s life is the transition made personal: raised by apocalyptic Puritans, educated alongside Newton, working with Hooke and Leibniz, he watches the medieval world become the modern one.