The poet Samuel Butler's assertion – 'There is no certain knowledge without demonstration' – is a good example of how the 17th century questions received dogmas and tries to establish scientific truth by using experiments.

When William Harvey (see below) is told that a particular toad is a witch's familiar, instead of accepting this, he dissects it to see if it's different from other toads. Once the mathematician Henry Briggs realises that astrology can't be proved by experiment, he stops believing in it.

The 17th century is a great time for science, with much discussion of the ideas of Continental boffins such as Galileo Galilei, Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler. However, there is still superstition: kings regularly handle sufferers of scrofula (a form of tuberculosis) to cure them – a ceremony known as 'touching for the king's evil'.

World class

Isaac Newton is the first man to be knighted for services to science. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a treatise on mathematics and physics that influences scientists until the 20th century, is published in 1687.

Newton makes many discoveries about how gravity affects the movement of objects and how planets orbit, although it's doubtful if he needed to observe a falling apple to understand these things.

He makes important discoveries about the nature of light, and about how it is made up of a spectrum of colours.

However, Newton remains a religious man to the end of his days, obsessed with God. He also tries to use alchemy to turn base metals into gold.

Scientific revolution

Gradually, however, experiments take the place of superstition.

Most scientists look for inspiration to Francis Bacon, who publishes the philosophical The Advancement of Learning in 1605.

In 1614, John Napier describes the use of logarithms. In 1628, William Harvey publishes De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis, which announces his discovery of how blood circulates around the body, pumped by the heart. It's in Latin, so you need a classical education (a privilege for only the minority) to understand it.

In the 1630s, astronomy gets a boost from the Liverpudlian Jeremiah Horrocks, who watches the heavens with a telescope and describes the first transit of Venus. In 1682, another astronomer, Edmond Halley, predicts the return of a comet that has already appeared in 1456, 1531 and 1607. When it does reappear in December 1758, 16 years after Halley's death, the comet is named after him.

The Tradescants – father and son both named John, and both gardeners to Charles I – introduce new plants such as the French willow, acacia and lilac.

During the 1650s, Robert Boyle works on air pressure and formulates the scientific law that bears his name (volume of gases vary in inverse proportion to the pressure put on them). Meanwhile, the Puritan Nicholas Culpeper publishes The English Physician Enlarged, or the Herbal (1653), which forms the basis for herbal medicine in the English-speaking world.

Royal Society

In 1660, the Royal Society is set up by a group of Oxford boffins who want to study the best in chemistry, architecture, music and any other branch of knowledge – it's a gloriously unspecialised time. Charles II is its patron as well as a member, and both Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton (see above) also belong.

Philosophy

The ideas of philosopher-mathematician René Descartes are widely discussed.

Thomas Hobbes, in his huge book Leviathan, published in 1651, argues that life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short', and recommends that people should obey their sovereign, who has a duty to protect them.

By the end of the century, John Locke publishes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which sees the mind as a 'tabula rasa', or clean slate, containing no innate ideas, but depending on sense impressions that it organises into ideas of increasing complexity. This idea becomes the cornerstone of the British empirical philosophy and influences thinkers for the next two centuries.

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