The Scientific Revolution was not a revolution in the sense of a sudden eruption ushering in radical change, but a century-long process of discovery in which scientists built on the findings of those who had come before — from the scientific achievements of the ancient Greeks to the scholarly contributions of Islamic thinkers, to the work of certain late-medieval and early-Renaissance Europeans. The expanding economy of the Age of Discovery represented another significant impulse, in that the need for better navigation, time-keeping, and naval engineering pushed Europeans to pose new questions and, in turn, devise new methods to solve them.
