Alexandre Koyré

Reshaped how historians think about the Scientific Revolution, arguing against the prevailing view that it was driven by experiment and observation alone — Koyré held that it was a shift in theoretical outlook, a change in how thinkers imagined the universe's structure, that made Galileo and Newton possible. He controversially proposed that some of Galileo's famous experiments were likely thought experiments rather than physical demonstrations, and his 1957 book From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe influenced Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and the whole subsequent field of history of science; he won the George Sarton Medal in 1961.