HOW SCIENCE DEVELOPS --- Episode 2

           Is There Such A Thing As A Scientific Revolution ? 

   We normally think of revolution in political terms : the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution.  Everything is overthrown ; a new world order begins. The first thinker to extend this notion of revolution to the sciences may have been Immanuel Kant. He saw two great intellectual revolutions. One was the transition in mathematical practice in which techniques familiar in Babylonia and Egypt were transformed in Greece to proofs from postulates. The second was the emergence of the experimental method and the laboratory,  a series of events that he identified as beginning with Galileo. He repeats the word revolution several times in just two long paragraphs of his 1787 book The Critique of Pure Reason [ a real page turner !!!! ] . 
   Although we think of Kant as the purest of scholars, you gotta bear in mind that he was living in turbulent times. Everyone knew that something profound was afoot all over Europe, and indeed the French Revolution was only two years away. It was Kant who set in place the idea of a scientific revolution. As philosophers we can find it amusing, and certainly forgivable, that honest Immanuel himself confesses, in a footnote, that he is not in a position to pay attention to the minutiae of historical details. 
   The great physicist/historian [ whom I'm plagiarizing the hell out of ] Thomas S. Kuhn wrote a first book concerned with science and its history and entitled it The Copernican Revolution. The idea of scientific revolution was already very much in circulation. After World War II there was a great deal of writing about the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon was its prophet, Galileo its lighthouse, and Newton its sun. 
   Some historians believe that there was a "second scientific revolution." It took place during the early years of the nineteenth century ; whole new fields were mathematized. Heat, light, electricity, and magnetism acquired paradigms, and suddenly a whole mass of unsorted phenomena began to make sense. this coincided with what we call the industrial revolution It was arguably the beginning of the modern technoscientific world in which we live. 
  Then, there came Einstein's special [1905] and then general [1916] theory relativity that were earth-shattering events. Relativity had, at the beginning,  far more repercussions in the humanities and arts than genuine testable consequences in physics. For sure, there was the famous expedition of Sir Arthur Eddington to test an astronomical prediction of the theory, but it was only later that relativity became integral to many branches of physics. 
   Then there was the quantum revolution, also a two-stage affair, with Max Planck's introduction of quanta around 1900 and then the full quantum theory of 1926-27, complete with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Combined, relativity and quantum physics overthrew not only old science but basic metaphysics. Kant had taught that absolute Newtonian space and the principle of uniform causality are a priori principles of thought, necessary conditions on how human beings comprehend the world in which they live. Physics proved him totally mistaken. Cause and effect were mere appearance, and indeterminacy was at the root of reality. Revolution was the order of the scientific day. 
   Karl Popper [1902--94] was a widely read philosopher of science. Popper had come of age during the second quantum revolution. It taught him that science proceeds by conjectures and refutations,to use the title of one of his books. It was a moralistic methodology that Popper claimed was exemplified by the history of science. First we frame bold conjectures, as testable as possible, and inevitably find them wanting. They are refuted, and a new conjecture must be found to fit the facts. Hypotheses can count as "scientific" only if they are falsifiable. This purist vision of science would have been unthinkable before the great turn-of-the-century revolutions.