To this question one can answer either 'yes' or 'no' and be correct with both conclusions as I will explain in this essay. It is all a matter of time. To the peasant, the servant and even the aristocracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, not only did the scientific revolution have little or no practical effect on their lives, most of them never even knew what it was or that it was happening. However, today in the twenty-first century not only are we aware that the scientific revolution took place at that time it is also obvious that our daily lives would be completely different had the scientific revolution not taken place.

In view of the above we need to look at both eras to assess both answers and also to establish exactly what was the scientific revolution.

The shift in the western mind from the medieval to the modern world was underpinned by the growth of science. Around the sixteenth, seventeenth and the eighteenth century, changes in the fields of Biology (looking at physiology and anatomy) and astronomy, which was mainly concerned with the issue of the solar system, began to occur. To begin with, these different factors became more and more established independently but then in the early eighteenth century they began to merge as one to create the Scientific Revolution, as these findings were spread to society. Some historians feel that the Scientific Revolution can be mainly described as the changing of man's view of what the Universe is and how it works.

The Scientific Revolution occurred largely due to 'imaginative' philosophers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. Before such philosophers as these the generally accepted astronomical system was that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe and that spheres holding 'fixed stars' (i.e. the moon, Jupiter...