The European Scientific Renaissance, which started in the sixteenth century, formulated a new conception of scientific knowledge. This conception was radically different from the scientific investigations that were made in Antiquity and much of the Middle Ages, at a time when the Aristotelian epistemological standard was in force. The so-called "modern science" operated a true "epistemological revolution", which began in the seventeenth century, but extending through the 18th and 19th centuries.
This epistemological revolution concerns the development of technical instruments for the purpose of observation, description and scientific experimentation. The defining characteristics of modern science have been exhaustively studied by authors such as Pierre Duhem, Alexandre Koyré, and Thomas S. Kuhn. Compared to Europe, the Islamists and Chinese did not make great paces during the beginning of the modern era, because Chinese scientific activity entered into a prolonged decline in the fourteenth century. Unlike European scientists of the Scientific Revolution, medieval Chinese thinkers did not attempt to reduce nature's observations to mathematical laws and did not form an academic community that offered peer review and progressive research. There was an increase in concentration on literature, the arts, public administration, while science and technology were viewed as trivial or restricted to a limited number of practical applications.