Podcast # 21: Revolution and Change

Scott:  My name is Scott Paton.  I am talking today with Allan Colston.  He is the author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”.  This is a book dealing with prophecy.

For those listeners who may be new to this topic, this Podcast is another in the series “Signs of the Times”.  Hello Allan and welcome to the Podcast. It’s been quite a while since we last spoke.

Thanks Scott, it’s good to be with you once again. Yes, it’s been about nine months since our last Podcast.

Scott:  At the time we last spoke you were focusing on Iran and their attempts to develop nuclear weapons.

Since then, I notice from your Blog that you have been writing about a variety of different subjects, ranging from the nature of comets and asteroids, to such things as the challenge of Christianity and the meaning of the Kingdom of God.

My question to you Allan is: Do all of these different topics relate to the subject of prophecy? And if so, how?

I am glad you asked that question Scott, because I think that a lot of readers of my Blog have probably been asking themselves the same thing. And the short answer is: Yes, they are all integrally related to the events that are about to unfold upon the earth.

But to explain how, it is necessary to delve first into the history and philosophy of science.

Scott:  I didn’t know there was such a thing as a philosophy of science. Surely science is the very opposite of philosophy.

You’re certainly not alone Scott. Many people think that way today. But if I was to ask you to name some of the most important scientists of the 20th century, I doubt if you would include the name of Thomas Kuhn.

Scott:  Well you’re right about that, Allan. In fact I’ve never even heard of him. Who was he?

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American scientist. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, and died in 1996 at the age of 73.

Soon after leaving school in 1940, he developed a serious interest in science and mathematics. He subsequently attended Harvard University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1943, followed shortly thereafter by a Masters and a Ph.D degree in Physics.

It was during his three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow that Thomas Kuhn found that his interests had changed, causing him to switch his scientific career from Physics to the History and Philosophy of Science.

At the suggestion of the University President, Kuhn later taught a course in the History of Science at Harvard for eight years, before leaving for the Berkeley campus of the University of California, where in 1961 he was named Professor of the History of Science.

The following year he published the work with which his name has ever since been linked, and which challenged the very foundations of the entire scientific enterprise. His book was called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions“.

Scott:  What was so important about his book?

Well Scott, what Kuhn did was to question the accepted philosophy of science at that time, which was to regard science as a linear pursuit in which one scientific discovery led naturally to another, leading up to the entire body of knowledge that is taught in our universities today.

Instead, Kuhn argued that this idea was wrong, and was not borne out by the facts.

Based on his own historical research, Kuhn found that progress in science was similar to that of society as a whole, in which steady development was punctuated from time to time by revolutionary outbreaks that led to dramatic changes in the nature of those societies.

In dissecting the nature of these scientific revolutions, Kuhn found that, like their social counterparts, each tended to display a common character, and to develop in common ways.

He found, for example, that every new scientific revolution did more than just build upon the theories of its predecessors. Each completely changed the thinking of the past, in a way which transformed the understanding of the scientists of that time.

Scott:  What exactly did Kuhn mean when he talked about scientific revolutions?

Well Scott, when people began to investigate the world around them in the 16th century, there were no accepted guidelines about what to do or how to go about it. So they simply went ahead and explored the things that interested them.

In due course, people with similar interests began to band together to form schools of common thought. These scientific pioneers conducted experiments and then communicated their results to others, in ways which allowed them to test these results for themselves.

As Kuhn explained in his book, in time there appeared certain scientists who were men of such towering intellectual ability, and who were able to explain existing facts in novel ways of such brilliant ingenuity, that they came to dominate the science of their day.

Scott:  Can you give us some examples?

Certainly. The first of these men who revolutionised the history of western science was Copernicus. Copernicus didn’t discover facts that were new to astronomers trained in the old Ptolemaic school of astronomy. What he did was to explain these facts in a totally new way.

It was his brilliant insight that it was the earth that travelled around the Sun, rather than the other way around, which enabled subsequent generations of astronomers to add a wealth of information about celestial objects, and to explain this information in ways which overcame the problems inherent in the old Ptolemaic system of astronomy.

Other examples of these intellectual giants were Sir Isaac Newton, the Scottish physicist James Maxwell, Max Planck and Albert Einstein. These men revolutionised the theoretical constructs of their times, in ways which had profound implications for future scientific research and development.

In referring to such men, Kuhn wrote (and I quote), “each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which scientific work was done”.

Kuhn called these transformations scientific revolutions, and he used the term “paradigm” to describe them.

Scott:  What did he mean by the term paradigm?

Kuhn defined a scientific paradigm as “the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community”.

Paradigms, according to Kuhn, were scientific revolutions which altered the entire perspectives of their times, and were “universally recognised scientific achievements that for a time provided model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners“.

In tracing the history of these scientific transformations, Kuhn noted that each new revolution did more than just build upon the theories of its predecessors. Instead they completely changed the foundations of the past.

In addition, Kuhn pointed out that as each new paradigm became entrenched, it became necessary not only to reconstruct past theory, but also to re-evaluate past fact.

What Kuhn meant by this was that each new revolution in scientific outlook meant that old ideas had to be re-assessed, and new textbooks had to be written that would interpret the past in the light of the new knowledge.

But as Kuhn went on to explain, no matter how successful each new paradigm happened to be, each came with a built-in flaw. Kuhn referred to this flaw as the “invisibility” of the paradigm

Scott:  And what did he mean by that, Allan?

He explained this as follows Scott. As each new scientific paradigm comes to be accepted by the majority of scientists of that time, the effect is to change the goalposts, so to speak, of what Kuhn calls “normal science”.

According to Kuhn, whenever a new scientific paradigm prevails, “normal science” tries to force nature into line with the new paradigm, motivated by the conviction that this new paradigm is at last able to explain nature “as it really is”.

Initially, scientists succeed brilliantly in solving problems that could hardly have been imagined under the old paradigm, and rapidly expand the technological possibilities of the new science.

As they do so, however, the paradigm under which they are operating begins to exert a subtle retraining influence. It does this by setting limits to what scientific problems are considered to be valid within that paradigm, and what can be ignored as being outside of the paradigm.

And this is where the “invisibility” of the paradigm reveals itself.

Those scientists who have been trained within a specific paradigm, and who have acquired its underlying philosophy of belief, don’t realise that they have allowed themselves to become trapped within the limitations of the paradigm itself.

Furthermore, they are unable to extricate themselves from the limitations of their existing paradigm, because they are generally unaware of its existence.

Scott:  So Allan, what does this mean in practice?

Well Scott, as Kuhn explained, young scientists don’t graduate with open minds that are capable of evaluating evidence in new ways. Their very education and training is an exercise in programming their minds according to the beliefs of the existing paradigm.

Scientific students aren’t free to accept or reject the theories of their textbooks. The scientific laws presented in them are illustrated by means of experiments which students are taught to accept as evidential proof of the correctness of these laws.

They are forced to accept them on the authority of their teachers, whose task it is to ensure that only those students who successfully embrace the beliefs of the current paradigm, are allowed to graduate.

So when a student undertakes an experiment and comes up with a result that is different from that set out in their textbooks, this result is regarded as evidence of the inadequacy of the student, rather than of any shortcoming in the law itself.

Scott:  So Allan, if Kuhn is correct, how and why do these different scientific revolutions come about?

That’s a good question, Scott. As Kuhn points out, normal science always operates within a paradigm, which is at first spectacularly successful in its ability to resolve problems that arise within the framework of that paradigm.

As the body of data generated by normal science grows, however, certain anomalies appear which cannot be explained by the paradigm. Initially these anomalies are small in number, and can easily be dismissed as being of little consequence in the overall scheme of things.

But as they grow more numerous, they become increasingly difficult to ignore, and the prevailing paradigm becomes increasingly unwieldy or contrived, while the number of critics continues to multiply.

It was precisely this state of unwieldy complexity in Ptolemaic astronomy, which was reduced to explaining the motion of celestial objects by means of an increasing number of cycles and “epicycles”, that led to the breakthrough in understanding provided by Copernicus.

When a scientific paradigm is overburdened by anomalies which it is unable to explain, it becomes ripe for revolutionary crisis.

Scott:  So how do these anomalies get resolved?

These crises have generally been resolved in the history of western science, by lonely men of genius, who have been able to evaluate these problems, and then present solutions based on an entirely new way of thinking

The founders of new paradigms have invariably been young men who, in one way or another, have escaped the conditioning of their colleagues, and who have not yet become entrenched within their own professions.

They are thus able to bring a new vision to their fields of practice, and to link past data in revolutionary ways which are successful in explaining most of the unexplained anomalies of the current paradigm.

At first, these revolutionary pioneers are ostracised by their peers and branded as cranks. Their ideas are inevitably rejected, particularly by “normal” scientists, who are the ones who have been conditioned by the old habits of thinking.

Not surprisingly, this resistance is invariably led by those scientists whose status and reputation have been built upon the old ideas, and therefore have the most to lose by an overthrow of the old regime.

Scott:  So Allan, how do these new scientific revolutions finally succeed?

Well Scott, every scientific revolution that has taken place over the last four hundred years, has proceeded very much like its social or military counterpart.

It has been led by a young and bold leader, who has been successful in drawing to his side recruits, who then do battle with the old guard who have become entrenched in the traditional ways of thinking.

Success, however, does not come easily or immediately. It often takes several generations before victory is complete and the old paradigm is successfully overthrown.

As I have already pointed out in an earlier post, it was Max Planck, who was himself the founder of a new scientific paradigm that initially provoked derision and scorn, who was sadly moved to write:

“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”.

But Planck was in good company, for it took almost a hundred years for the ideas of Copernicus to become generally accepted, while Newton’s theories of gravity were not adopted in his own lifetime.

Finally, Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has become arguably the most explosive theory in the history of science, and which daily dominates our lives in the form of the threat of nuclear war, was at first met with complete disbelief.

And to this day, over a hundred years since it was first postulated, it has failed to merit the Nobel prize for physics.

In my next Podcast Scott, I want to discuss the anomalies that exist within the current scientific paradigm, and explain why it is now ripe for a new revolutionary way of thinking about the universe that is already on the horizon.

Scott:  Thanks Allan for giving us a fascinating insight into the history of science. You have been listening to Allan Colston, author of the book “The Last Days of Tolemac”.  Do join us for our next Podcast in the series titled “Signs of the Times”.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2014 at 12:13 pm and is filed under AUDIO, Revolution and Change, Signs of the Times, The Fallacy of Scientific Truth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.