In 1600, the educated elite of Europe still believed that heavy objects fell faster than light ones because Aristotle said so. They explained disease through imbalances of bodily humors and determined truth by citing ancient texts rather than observing the world. Within a century, this entire intellectual framework would collapse, replaced by something unprecedented: a method for understanding nature that actually worked.

The transformation from natural philosophy to modern science wasn't just an upgrade in knowledge—it was a revolution in how humans could know anything at all. This shift from reverence for ancient authority to systematic investigation of nature represents perhaps the most consequential intellectual breakthrough in human history.

Francis Bacon recognized a fundamental flaw in how Europeans sought knowledge: they started with conclusions from revered texts, then looked for examples to support them. Aristotle claimed women had fewer teeth than men, and for centuries, no one bothered to count. Medieval scholars debated how many angels could dance on a pinhead while ignoring the actual behavior of physical objects around them.

Bacon proposed something radical: begin with observations, lots of them, before drawing any conclusions. His Novum Organum (1620) outlined a systematic method where investigators would collect data, look for patterns, test those patterns through experiment, and only then form theories. This 'inductive method' reversed millennia of philosophical practice that began with first principles and deduced downward.

More revolutionary still was Bacon's insistence that knowledge should be collaborative and cumulative. Rather than individual philosophers constructing complete systems of thought, scientists would build on each other's observations, creating a body of knowledge that grew more accurate over time. This meant accepting that current understanding was provisional—always subject to revision when better evidence emerged.

When Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1687, he didn't just explain how objects moved—he proved that nature followed precise mathematical laws. His equations predicted the paths of planets and projectiles with stunning accuracy. For the first time, humans could calculate what would happen in the physical world before observing it.

This mathematical precision shattered the medieval worldview completely. Natural philosophers had explained motion through ideas like 'natural place'—stones fell because they 'desired' to reach the earth, flames rose because fire 'sought' the heavens. Newton replaced these anthropomorphic explanations with equations that worked regardless of human intuition or philosophical preferences.

The implications were staggering. If mathematics could describe celestial mechanics, what else might yield to mathematical analysis? Suddenly, the universe appeared less like a realm of mysterious forces and divine whims and more like a vast machine operating according to discoverable rules. This shift from qualitative to quantitative thinking would eventually transform chemistry, biology, and even human behavior into domains of scientific investigation.

What truly distinguishes science from earlier forms of knowledge isn't just empiricism or mathematics—it's the specific practices that make science systematically self-correcting. Peer review, reproducible experiments, and statistical analysis create a framework where errors are eventually discovered and corrected, regardless of the prestige or authority of whoever made them.

Consider the requirement for reproducibility: any legitimate scientific finding must be replicable by other researchers following the same methods. This simple requirement eliminates countless errors that plagued natural philosophy. When Robert Boyle published his air pump experiments, he included such detailed instructions that anyone with sufficient resources could build their own pump and verify his results.

The scientific community also developed cultural norms that rewarded skepticism and error correction. Young scientists could build careers by disproving established theories—unthinkable in systems based on deference to authority. When Einstein overturned Newton's physics, it validated rather than threatened the scientific enterprise. This institutionalized skepticism, combined with methodological rigor, created a knowledge system that grew more accurate over time rather than simply accumulating claims.

The transformation from natural philosophy to modern science gave humanity its first reliable method for understanding the physical world. This wasn't simply a matter of adding experiments to philosophy or applying mathematics to nature—it required inverting fundamental assumptions about where knowledge comes from and how certainty is achieved.

Today, when we instinctively ask 'what's the evidence?' rather than 'what did the authorities say?', we're heirs to this Enlightenment revolution. The scientific method's power lies not in making us infallible, but in providing systematic ways to discover and correct our inevitable errors—a gift that continues to expand the boundaries of human knowledge.