My friend Derek convinced me to pick up Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and while it’s far beyond my meager hack-scientific geek level, I’ve greatly enjoyed it for its sociological implications.
Kuhn’s work describes the way in which a community, science in his case, adopts a new paradigm, and he goes to great lengths to detail the way in which a new paradigm is adopted. Working purely from textbooks, most people have an assumption that any paradigm shift in science (or sociological/religious history) can be pointed to as occurring at one discovery, person, or year. In reality, this is hardly ever the case. There is a complex back and forth in the scientific community. The paradigm shift is initiated by a finding that runs contrary to normal science. Normal science is not nearly as exploratory as it is portrayed; it relies on foundational methods and expectations that under gird an experiment to dictate predictable/acceptable outcomes. Normally, data yielded by an experiment that runs contrary to the established expectations are indicative of user error on the part of the scientist. An unexpected finding, if it is publicized, merely plants a seed for the scientific community to continue to try to disprove.
Between normal science “business-as-usual” and a complete paradigm shift lies the intermediary state of a constantly adjusted theorem. Kuhn cites Ptolemy vs. Copernicus. Copernicus is remembered for forcing the scientific world into a helio-centric paradigm wherein the earth no longer had the sun and stars revolving around it. Copernicus was not the first to discover this (the Greeks had known of this nearly a millennium before) and nor did his discovery happen at a pinpointed moment, but this is how we remember him. Since the second century A.D., the scientific community had been constantly revamping Ptolemy’s geo-centric model to account for odd findings. The problem with overthrowing the geo-centric model was that, for all its flaws and lack of parsimony, it was incredibly accurate in its capacity for predicting planetary location. Even into the 20th century, long after the helio-centric debate had been settle, astro-engineers employed Ptolemaic theory to make calculations for the Apollo program. Copernican helio-centric theory was not much more accurate at predicting planet locations, nor was it much simpler, than Ptolemy; it was not momentarily obvious that Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was bunk.
As a general rule, the younger have a faster buy-in towards a new paradigm than the older. The old regime has spent too much of their lives buying into a paradigm to release it as simply.
Another scientific revolution Kuhn alludes to constantly is the debate on the nature of light. Descartes posited that light was composed of corpuscles, small particles similar to any other atom. This theory dominated until the advent of wave theory, the observation that light behaves more like a sound wave than a particle. This is a case in which the scientific community has not settled to this day. The problem of light is that after centuries of debate, we still observe light as acting like both particle and wave. The two categories are mutually exclusive. We will eventually settle the debate of what light is, but it will most likely require a massive restructuring of our paradigm that will reach beyond science into philosophy. In other words, so far as we can paradoxically tell, light cannot be both particle and wave, but nevertheless, it is both.
The fascinating implication may be that the Law of Noncontradition, that A does not equal non-A, does not work at the subatomic level. And if that is in fact the case, it is only a matter of time before the this axiom’s destruction works its way into our philosophy, religion, and culture.
I’m particularly interested to keep plowing through Kuhn’s work with the question of what this means for philosophy and religion. Paradigm shifts rarely completely eradicate the old regime; it is the marginalization of the old perspective which is inherent. The process of paradigm shift always takes time, even as each person is living testimony to the way in which maturation is an ever-present, ever-shifting phenomenon. I can pinpoint one time at which I was a child and another at which I was an adult, but I cannot pinpoint a moment at which that transition happened. I can point to a time I was a fundamentalist in my religiosity, but I cannot point to an exact moment or even exact year at which the light bulb came on.
What is also certain is that the paradigm shift is never a movement to a final stage. Einstein, General Relativity, and quantum mechanics may have demolished Newtonian physics, but Einstein will similarly be matured-beyond in the coming days. We are always maturing as a race, but never matured.
Posted by taddelay 
Posted by taddelay 
Posted by taddelay 
