A transformation in how European thinkers understood and investigated the natural world — running from Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system to Newton's laws of motion — that established the experimental method, mathematical description of nature, and the idea of a law-governed universe as the foundations of modern science.
Between 1543 and 1687, European thinkers overturned a cosmology that had governed educated thought for nearly two thousand years. The Earth was displaced from the center of the universe; the heavens were shown to follow the same physical laws as the Earth; and the idea that nature could be precisely described in mathematical terms was demonstrated so convincingly that it has never since been seriously challenged. The Scientific Revolution is not merely a chapter in the history of science — it is the event that created modern science as a form of knowledge and established its authority over other ways of understanding the world.