Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 42

By the late Middle Ages, the growth of towns started a slow but profound change in the social and economic order across Europe. Trade became more important and the source of wealth and power began to switch from feudalism, in which wealth was based on the ownership of land and the ability to raise armies from the peasants who worked the land, to commerce. Along with this emphasis on trade and commerce, came a new interest in technical know-how, particularly with regard to mining and navigation. In the sixteenth century, there were revolutionary discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and optics but the scientific revolution did not really get rolling until the seventeenth century. This was the era of Isaac Newton (1642–1747) who, among other things, discovered gravity and calculus. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) invented a powerful telescope and championed the heliocentric world view that the earth orbits around the sun. William Harvey (1578–1657) described the circulation of the blood, and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) proposed the wave theory of light. These revolutionary discoveries set the stage for the emergence of the science of psychology in the late nineteenth century.