section_path: Introduction/Significance
section_name: Significance
paragraph_text: Significance
  
  The period saw a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas across mathematics, physics, astronomy, and biology in institutions supporting scientific investigation and in the more widely held picture of the universe. The Scientific Revolution led to the establishment of several modern sciences. In 1984, Joseph Ben-David wrote:
  
  Rapid accumulation of knowledge, which has characterized the development of science since the 17th century, had never occurred before that time. The new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years. (Since the 19th century, scientific knowledge has been assimilated by the rest of the world).
  
  Many contemporary writers and modern historians claim that there was a revolutionary change in world view. In 1611 English poet John Donne wrote:
  
  new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
  
  The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
  
  Can well direct him where to look for it.
  
  Butterfield was less disconcerted but nevertheless saw the change as fundamental:
  
  Since that revolution turned the authority in English not only of the Middle Ages but of the ancient world—since it started not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.... looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.
  
  Historian Peter Harrison attributes Christianity to having contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution:
  
  historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions.... Yet, many of the leading figures in the scientific revolution imagined themselves to be champions of a science that was more compatible with Christianity than the medieval ideas about the natural world that they replaced.