Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck ( 1858 -1947) noted, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?
Ideas change, and the times we live in change. Perhaps the biggest change today is the rate of change. What established scientific idea is ready to be moved aside so that science can advance?
Hat tip ~ Edge.org, This Idea Must Die
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
From the Big Bang to the Fall of the House of Lehman...
the Rise and Fall of Slothosaurus Rex....
It was the Best of Times...It was the Worst of Times...
It was the Best of Times...It was the Worst of Times...
Friday, November 6, 2015
Platos Cave and the Flat Earth Society...
"Before Copernicus, mankind knew that the earth sat motionless at the very center of the universe with the sun and stars turning around it. After Copernicus, we knew the earth was just a minor planet orbiting an unremarkable star. He was the first of the scientific revolutionaries, but he was not the last. He has been followed by a long and glorious list of imitators. These copycat revolutionaries borrowed his scientific methods and to a surprising degree also used very similar imaginative tricks to turn their own fields into sciences.
It is worth pondering what Copernicus did and what he did not do. Copernicus did not make any new astronomical observations of significance. His breakthrough did not rely on new mathematics or other astronomical techniques. He did not produce a more accurate astronomical model than the previous Ptolemaic system. He provided no experimental demonstration that his model was superior to the Ptolemaic system.
All that Copernicus did was to describe the universe in a simpler, more logical way. Copernicus provided conceptual efficiency. His triumph was in the elegance of his model, which allowed subsequent workers to think more around it.
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