Secular Café: Scientific Revolutions: Overthrowing or Encompassing?

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

Scientific Revolutions: Overthrowing or Encompassing? May 7th 2012, 07:28 Correspondence in Cosmology by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack Abstract: Quote: The claim of Thomas Kuhn that scientific revolutions overthrow preceding theories is only true in the early stages of a science, as illustrated by the Copernican revolution. Once a field has established a fundamental theory, for example Newtonian mechanics, that theory is usually encompassed rather than overthrown by a broader theory that reduces to (i.e., makes the same predictions as) the older theory in appropriate circumstances. The old, encompassed theory then represents the highest grade of truth possible in science, within the limited arena in which its predictions agree with those of the encompassing theory. Physics is searching for a theory that can encompass relativity and quantum theory, not overthrow them. The Big Bang cosmology has encompassed the Newtonian solar system. Inflationary Cold Dark Matter cosmology, our most promising theory today to encompass the Big Bang, challenges us to reassess our human role in light of the new metaphors and visions of our highly counter-intuitive universe. Religions might make moral progress by adopting the scientific model of "encompassing revolutions" and opening to the realization that a larger picture of reality could respectfully encompass the wisdom of their tradition without threatening it. This is a response to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book, he famously argued that the progress of science involves the overthrow of old paradigms and the establishment of new ones. He famously argued that old and new paradigms are "incommensurable", meaning that they cannot be compared to each other. This suggests that the progress of science is little better than one fashion replacing another one. NEA and JRP responded by arguing that overthrows usually happen only in the early stages of some scientific field, that later paradigm shifts are due to a new paradigm encompassing or subsuming another paradigm. The old ones then become special cases of the new ones, like limiting cases or emergent effects. Isaac Asimov had made a similar point in Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong. I think that they are correct. One can list oodles of examples. One of my favorite ones is Newtonian vs. Einsteinian mechanics (relativity). Newtonian mechanics is in error by an amount that's approximately (v/c)2, where v is a typical velocity and c is the speed of light in a vacuum, which might be called the Einstein speed. As to religion, some long-running religious traditions have handled new sacred books in a similar way, treating them as additions to their predecessors' sacred books. In the Abrahamic religions, Judaism started out with the Tanakh / Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. Xianity added the New Testament, Islam the Koran, and Bahaism The Most Holy Book (Kitab-i-Aqdas). All of them make connections to their predecessors. The New Testament presents Jesus Christ as being the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament, complete with descent from King David. Islamic tradition presents Mohammed as having had lots of predecessor prophets, like Abraham, Moses, Alexander the Great, and Jesus Christ. Bahaism goes even further, recognizing them all as predecessors of Baha'u'llah, along with Zoroaster and Krishna.

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