Peter Russell on Paradigm Shift (video)

[Pharaoh]

Breakthrough discoveries are usually rejected before being accepted. (5 min)

http://personalgrowthcourses.net/video/russell_peter_paradigm_shift2

[gtar100]

1. Great explanation.

I think there are parallels to the unfortunate political situation in which we find ourselves. And this is probably the key to the ultimate solution:

"New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die." -Max Planck

Fundamentalists, conservatives, and teabaggers all alike stand in opposition to the great ideas we know work, beginning with the scientific process itself. I would include with that the great economic experiment we call The New Deal. Many good things happened for many people as a result of The New Deal. Not perfectly but they did. In typical fashion, the conservative response to things that we're not working well has been to destroy the whole thing rather than fix it.

They've had 30 to 40 years to implement "supply-side economics" (or, "Austrian School" economic policy) in its place here in the US. They've even had a chance to implement these policies in smaller countries throughout Central and South America (most prominently, Chili). What they've succeeded at doing in all cases is to make a spectacular mess of things and cause untold suffering. You'd think the evidence before them would convince them of their folly. You'd think that a reasonably sane person would stop supporting these efforts. Instead they march on like blind, loyal idiots, leaving their mess for future generations to clean up.

As this video explains so well, it takes more than factual evidence to convince people. Unfortunately, it takes the passing away of the oppressive ignorant. When a new generation of people can learn unimpeded, they can decide for themselves what is best. After all, it is our descendants that must live with the consequences of our actions, just as it happened to us in turn. Only conservatives and fundamentalists need propaganda and manipulation. We need only to present ideas to open minds and allow truth to speak for itself. If we are shown to be wrong, we stand corrected and move on. If a fundamentalist is shown to be wrong, they are thrown into a life crisis that threatens their very foundation.

[Odin2005]

2. I think Thomas Kuhn's ideas are overrated and misleading.

His notion that there is a distinction between "ordinary science" and "revolutionary science" is based on a superficial "pop-sci" understanding of the history of science and the scientific community. New "paradigms" do not happen suddenly, that is an illusion caused by how new scientific ideas become known in society at large.

Evolution is a good example. The development of modern ideas about evolution and natural selection evolved slowly over a period from about 1800 to today. Darwin was not a single lone genius fighting unchanging conventional wisdom. and even Darwin's and Wallace's ideas were not "evolution" as we understand it today because they did not understand how inheritance of traits works. The fusion between Darwin's ideas and Mendelian Genetics did not occur until the 1930s and 1940s.

And even THAT does not fully describe Evolution as we understand it today, because in 1950 most biologists didn't really understand how fast evolution can occur given the right conditions. Then came Stephen J. Gould and his idea that many species don't change much until a strong selection force hits a population, controversial at first, but then vindicated when studies of Galapagos Finches showed that populations evolved quickly to cyclical climatic changes, but everything evened out in the long term.

[Jim__]

3. Kuhn had a superficial "pop-sci" understanding of the history of science?

Professor Kuhn had a doctorate in physics and was an assistant professor of history of science at Harvard. He was full professor of history of science at Berkeley, Princeton, and MIT. In the preface to his work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he goes through some of the 15 year background to the writing of the book.

Can you be specific and explain why this extensive background in science, philosophy and the history of science only gave Professor Kuhn a superficial "pop-sci" understanding of the history of science? Can you be specific and explain how you've come to, not only a deeper understanding of that history than Kuhn had, but the capacity to read Kuhn and determine that his understanding of the history of science is so inadequate?

[Odin2005]

4. One example is his misunderstanding of the so-called "Copernican Revolution"

In the late Middle Ages there were plenty of people becoming skeptical of Geocentrism. In the 1300s Bishop Nicolas Oresme had discovered inertia and explicitly stated that his discovery made a sun-centered cosmology POSSIBLE, but said there was no empirical evidence to prove one way or another, which was completely true at the time, before telescopes there was no way to prove which was correct. It was NOT because conservative intellectuals were insistent that the Earth was at the center, that is a popular myth created during the Enlightenment. Copernicus' views were, in fact, not based on new evidence, but on his own philosophical beliefs, which is why he continued to insist on perfectly circular orbits. It is not until Galileo and his telescope observations that Geocentrism was disproven.

Galileo's ideas did not come fully formed out of nowhere, they stood on 300 years of previous discoveries and ideas.

There is no sharp division between "normal science" and "revolutionary science". Instead, theories slowly and gradually rise, crest, fall, and then are either disproven or are integrated as an approximation of a later theory that has built on top of the old one.

[Jim__]

5. What part of this do you think Kuhn got wrong?

Before Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SOSR), he wrote a book, The Copernican Revolution. He was a recognized expert on the subject. Do you think the Kuhn claimed Copernicus' heliocentric system was original? Even in SOSR he talks about Aristarchus who had a heliocentric system more than 1500 years before Copernicus. Kuhn's point is not that a scientific revolution occurs when there is new information. Kuhn's point is that the growing crisis under the current paradigm leads to the creation, and more importantly, the eventual acceptance of the new paradigm. Copernicus' system was more complex and less accurate than Ptolemy's. It was the current crisis of the Ptolemaic system that gave Copernicus' system a chance.