HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 1

  UNDERSTANDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE 


                            LOOKING BACK AT 1962

    1962 was a long time ago, when one is talking about scientific development. The sciences have changed dramatically since then. The queen of sciences, then, was physics. Few people knew much physics, but everybody knew that physics was where the action was. A cold war was in progress, so everyone knew about "THE BOMB." American schoolchildren had to practice cowering under their desks. Thse who protested against a nuclear weapon stood a chance of being arrested, and some were. Bob Dylan first performed "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" in September 1962. Everyone assumed it was about nuclear fallout. In October 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come, after 1945, to nuclear war. Physics and its threats were on everyone's mind. 
   The Cold War is long over, and physics is no longer where the action is. Another event of 1962 was th awarding of Nobel prizes to Francis Crick and James Watson for the molecular biology DNA and to Max Perutz and John Kendrew for the molecular biology of hemoglobin. That was the harbinger of change. Today biotechnology rules. Add in information science. Add in what the computer has done to the practice of science. Even experiment is not what it used to be, for it has been modified and to a certain extent replaced by computer simulation. And everyone knows that the computer has changed communication. In 1962 scientific results were announced at meetings, in special seminars, in preprints, and then in articles published in specialist journals. journals. Today the primary mode of publication is in an electronic archive. 
   There is yet another fundamental difference between 2015 and 1962. It affects fundamental physics. In 1962 there were competing cosmologies : STEADY STATE and BIG BANG, two completely different pictures of the universe and its origin. After 1965 and the almost fortuitous discovery of UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND RADIATION, there is only the big bang, full of outstanding problems pursued as normal science.  In 1962 high-energy physics seemed to be an endless collection of more and more particles.  What is called the standard model brought order out of chaos. It is unbelievably accurate in its predictions, even if we have no idea how to fit it together with gravity. Perhaps there will not be another revolution in fundamental physics, although there will no doubt be surprises galore. 

          EXPLAINING THE  DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE 
         REQUIRES A DISCUSSION OF BOTH STRUCTURE
         AND REVOLUTION

                       A DISCUSSION OF STRUCTURE 

 There are scientific revolutions but they have a structure. It's easier to understand this if one can attach a useful name to each node in the structure.  Here are the aphorisms that can be used to understand structure : [1] normal science ; [2] puzzle-solving; [3] paradigm; [4] anomaly; [5] crisis; and [6] revolution, which establishes a new paradigm. 

  That is the structure of scientific revolutions : normal science with a paradigm and a dedication to solving puzzles ; followed by serious anomalies, which lead to a crisis ; and finally resolution of the crisis by a new paradigm. Another important word that has not been yet mentioned is incommensurability.  This is the idea that, in the course of a revolution and a paradigm shift, the new ideas and assertions cannot be strictly compared to the old ones. Even if the same words are in use, their very meaning has changed. That in turn led to the idea that a new theory was not chosen to replace an old one, because it was true but more because of a change in world view. Progress in science may not be a simple line leading to the truth. It may be a matter of making more progress away from less adequate conceptions of, and interactions with,  the world.