Since the time of Voltaire, some observers have considered that a revolutionary change in thought, called in recent times a scientific revolution, took place around the year 1600; that is, that there were dramatic and historically rapid changes in the ways in which scholars thought about the physical world and studied it.

Science, as it is treated in this account, is essentially understood and practiced in the modern world; with various "other narratives" or alternate ways of knowing omitted.Alexandre Koyré coined the term and definition of 'The Scientific Revolution' in 1939, which later influenced the work of traditional historians A. Rupert Hall and J.D.

Bernal and subsequent historiography on the subject (Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 1996).The event which many historians of science call the scientific revolution can be dated roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius publishes his De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body).

As with many historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about its boundaries.

Although the period is commonly dated to the 16th and 17th centuries, some see elements contributing to the revolution as early as the middle ages, and finding its last stages in chemistry and biology in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There is general agreement, however, that the intervening period had seen a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas in physics, astronomy, and biology, in institutions supporting scientific investigation, and in the more widely held picture of the universe.

As a result, the scientific revolution is commonly viewed as a foundation and origin of modern science.

The "Continuity Thesis" is the opposing view that there is no radical discontinuity between the development of science in the Middle Ages and later developments in the Renaissance and early modern period.