FREE ESSAY ON HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

The world of science, as we know it today, is a difficult subject to grasp. So many new
ideas are present and these new ideas are not interchangeable. Some parts do work
together although as a whole they don't fully coincide with each other. The three basic
ideas that science is now based upon come from Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. I call
these ideas/theories "new" based on what I classify the state of the scientific community
of today. After looking at what is going on in science, it is clear to me that the
scientific world is in a crisis state. According to Kuhn, a crisis state is when science
is in the middle of choosing a particular paradigm to work under. For scientists, there
is a general theme or way of thinking which constitutes how they conduct their work and
how they analyze their results. Kuhn goes to great measures to classify this scenario as
paradigm. In chapter two of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn states
"(paradigms)...provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of
scientific research," (p.10). If this is what scientists agree upon as paradigm then it
is obvious that science is in a crisis state. At the present time, scientific
explanations vary depending on what part of science is being explored. Until there is an
idea/theory that explains science as a whole, science will be in a crisis state. In order
for scientists to successfully remove themselves from this crisis state they need to
understand how science arrived to this point and why it has stayed there for the past
century. 
In the seventeenth century a scientists known as Newton came forward with his Principia
Mathematica. In Shlain's Art and Physics he states that, "He made sweeping discoveries
about gravity, motion, and light." This Principia explained every part of science that
was known to man. (Keep in mind that "Science that is known to man," is a very important
piece to my theory.) In the time of Newton, the three laws of motion were sufficient for
explaining how and why the world works as it does. Newton's theory consisted of the three
laws of motion. The first one, every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform
motion, unless it's compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. The
second law states that the change of motion is proportional to the motive force
impressed, and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is
impressed. The third law simply pulls the two together by stating that to every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton had given the world what we now know as
physics. For the past three hundred years Newtonian Mechanics have been taught to every
student aspiring to elevate their minds. Newtonian Mechanics were the end all to the
questions that had plagued thinkers since the beginning of time. The key difference is
that Newton was never exposed to the world of science that technology had made prevalent
to the likes of an Einstein or Hawking, or even my colleague studying neuro surgery at
John's Hopkins University. When Newton was sitting under his apple tree conjuring up
ideas for how and why he did not fly off into space or why the harder you hit something
the farther it goes, technology was moving along at the rate of most people's
grandmothers in their walkers. The scientists that had surrounded Newton knew only of
what they could see. Their were no people looking to the far ends of the galaxies and
their were no people looking in to the unseen cells that make up everything that we can
see. Basically, Newton did not have a reason to explain what he was not aware of. He did
have quite good reason, however, to explain why he got a bump on his head from that ripe
apple that no longer needed the shelter of the tree. According to Shlain, Newton set the
world he knew to mechanics and set the parameters for the new and final, well what was
thought to be the final paradigm of the world. 
Then in 1905, Einstein came forth with his special theory of relativity and his general
theory of relativity. This opened up a whole new world of science that Newton, in the
seventeenth century could not even fathom. For this very reason, the crisis state in the
scientific community began. Although Einstein explained the new frontier in science, he
still agreed with some of what Newton thought. Again, they worked together, but they did
not totally agree. For Newton, space and time were two different entities. Einstein put
these two entities, or as Newton called them absolutes, together and formed the fourth
dimension. Einstein had formulated what is now known as the spacetime continuum. This
theory is extremely hard to grasp, so some background of Einstein is needed to completely
understand it. First, Einstein stated his special theory of relativity, which is
dependent upon two postulates. The first is simply that the laws of physics are constant
throughout the universe. In the second postulate when he states that the speed of light
is constant for all observers regardless of how fast and in what direction they are
moving. Up until the emergence of Einstein's general theory of relativity he was still
conducting normal science under the thinking of Newton. He began the crisis state of the
scientific community with one simple equation. Einstein stated that energy and mass are
equivilant (E=mc2). With this he claimed that "space is time" is equal to "matter is
energy". This describes mathematically how matter tells spacetime how to curve and how
spacetime tells matter how to behave. This is very different from Newton because of the
fact that Newton was certain that light was always a straight entity whereas now light
could in fact be bent and sometimes is. This also brought about the fact that gravity is
no different than acceleration which for Newton, was impossible. Einstein's theory also
said that the universe was static. Again, science was being conducted under the paradigm
of technology of its time. Other scientists took the findings of Einstein and started
looking into other aspects that Einstein could not explore. 
In 1922, Friedmann speculated that the universe was identical in whatever direction we
look. This would be true if we were observing the universe from anywhere else. Friedmann
was implying that the universe was not static, but I don't think he knew this until the
emergence of another scientist. That scientist was Edwinn Hubble. He built the Hubble
telescope which allowed scientists to see something that was never thought was there.
Hubble began to investigate the motion of the galaxies. Hubble noticed that the light of
distant galaxies that were moving away form us was red-shifted and the light from
galaxies moving towards us was blue shifted. These findings led to more studies of
scientists and the depth of these studies grew as the technology advanced. Eventually,
Roger Penrose began to discover and study black holes. Through his findings he showed
that a star collapsing under it's own gravity is trapped in a region whose surface and
volume eventually shrink to zero. This brought about a singularity contained with in
spacetime. Stephen Hawking then took Penrose's findings to another level. He basically
reversed the direction of time and showed that the shrinking could have been an
explosion. If this was the case there must have been a big bang that caused the universe
to be created. There was a catch to this theory, however. In order for this to be the
case the general theory of relativity had to be correct and the universe had to contain
as much matter as we perceive that it does. The falicy of this argument lies in the
theory of quantum mechanics. This is the theory that describes small scale phenomena. The
problem is that quantum mechanics does not coincide with the general theory of
relativity. So now, scientists have a theory that describes the universe and a completely
different theory that describes how things such as atoms and molecules work. This is the
epitome of what Kuhn calls a crisis state in the scientific community.
Newton produced a paradigm, and that was sufficient for about two-hundred years.
Technology advanced and Einstein used it to prove that Newton was not completely correct.
This was sufficient for about twenty years and technology gave way to Hubble who then
gave way to scientists such as Penrose and Hawking. Technology also allowed scientists to
further explore the minute realm of what we consist of and this produced quantum
mechanics. Today, the scientific world is faced with the most difficult problem ever
confronted in scientific history. In order to completely understand what the world we
live in is, the two major theories of present science have to be meshed together in a way
that both can work. This would then propel the scientific community in to the comfortable
hands of a paradigm. There is only one problem that I see with this endeavor. If, and
that's a big if, technology does not advance at the rate that it has in the past century
or half century or even in the past two decades I have no doubt that an all encompassing
theory could be brought to the table. My question is, what happens to science when
technology opens up a frontier that quantum mechanics can't explain and a whole new
theory is needed to explain that? Is the scientific world now compelled to constantly
remain in a crisis state because of the advancement of human knowledge? These are
questions that only time can answer, but I would like to leave you with one thought; Is
the elimination of God in order to know how the universe began really that important? 
Bibliography
Calder, Nigel. Einstein's Universe. Penguin Books. London, 1990.
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books. New York, 1996.
Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics. Quill William Morrow. New York, 1991.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press.
Chicago, 1996.