Chapter 5 Chapter 3 Identifying Evidence for the Occurrence of a Scientific Revolution

It is impossible to completely avoid such a set of related questions when discussing scientific revolutions: (1) What is a revolution? (2) How can we say whether a revolution has taken place?At first glance, they may not seem so dissimilar, especially if one believes that all definitions of perfection must have an "operational" component.The results show that it is possible to efficiently test whether revolutions in science occur, even in the absence of clear definitions. Kuhn (1962) characterizes a revolution in science as a (in his own words) "paradigm" shift that occurs when a series of "anomalies" has led to a "crisis," which characterizes It helps us to formulate a definition systematically and to test it.However, in trying to refine the three concepts of anomaly, crisis, and paradigm, we are confronted with a triple problem.In addition, there is the problem (already mentioned) that Kuhn's schema does not apply to all scientific revolutions exactly.

Nor can I give an easy answer to the question of what constitutes a revolution.I repeat, historically, in the four centuries or so that modern science has existed, scientists and observers of science have tended to call certain events revolutions.These events include fundamental changes in concepts, radical changes in standard or accepted norms of interpretation, the emergence of new assumptions, axioms, new forms of acceptable knowledge, and other A new theory of nature.The Newtonian revolution led to the fundamental concept of gravitation, and achieved the purpose of expressing and developing natural philosophy in mathematical language; the Cartesian revolution was judged to be based on "mechanistic philosophy", which used matter and motion to explain all phenomenon; the introduction of the molecular motion theory of gas and the concept of radioactivity are all based on probability theory, while quantum theory even denies the simple non-probability causal theory; the theory of evolution denies that species are fixed, and it A science was also introduced that did not allow the prediction of individual events; the theory of relativity not only sounded the death knell of absolute space-time, but fundamentally changed the apparently simplistic notion of simultaneity; the Harvey Revolution introduced the idea that blood From the heart through the arteries and back to the heart through the veins, it goes on and on, and the Harvey Revolution rejected the long-established and well-established doctrine that blood is nothing but a rush and flow in the veins. Ebb, it is constantly produced from the liver.In all of these cases there occurred what was (and still is) commonly called a revolution.Whether we like the word "revolution" or not, and whether or not we are able to come up with a definition that applies to all of these examples and a few others, this is a historical fact.

My main purpose here is to understand the revolutions that are admitted to have occurred, rather than to analyze a certain concept in the abstract, so my research method has always been to examine how people understand revolutions in science. of.And this requires a simultaneous four-item series of tests, perhaps universally applicable to all important scientific events that have occurred in the past four centuries.These tests are purely based on history and facts.The first part that constitutes it is the witness testimony, the judgment of the scientists and non-scientists of the time.Among these eyewitnesses, I imagine, were philosophers, political scientists, people engaged in political affairs, social scientists, journalists, literary figures, and even educated laymen.When Fontenelle recorded his impressions of the time in which Newton and Leibniz were still alive and working on the development of calculus, Fontenelle had the impression that their creations were already There was a revolution in mathematics.In the decade after Newton's death, Crelow hailed Newton's Principia, calling it a "new era" of revolution in the science of mechanics.Lavoisier's fundamental reform of the chemical revolution was regarded by many scientists of his time as a revolution in chemistry.Many of Darwin's contemporaries described evolution as a revolution in biology.In the 1920s and 1930s, long before the status of continental drift changed from a revolution in literature to a revolution in science, it was obvious to geoscientists that Wegener's ideas about continental motion would cause a revolution.All these revolutions pass the first test—the witnesses of the time.

This is true in three of the above examples: the scientists who played a major role in the occurrence of the revolution (Lavoisier, Darwin, Wegener) all clearly stated that their own work would probably cause a revolution.This agreement with other eyewitnesses adds to the strength of those eyewitnesses' testimony.The meager evidence of this particularity, however, should obviously not be taken too seriously, since most scientists, bound by the conventions of the scientific enterprise, are often too modest or too prudish to make such claims about their own creations. evaluate.On the other hand, I would not put too much faith in ex-post historical assessments that a scientific revolution actually happened if there were no eyewitnesses to confirm that the event took place (such as Mendel in the 19th century or Babbage's scientific revolution) of.

A scientist may think that he is causing or has caused a revolution, although later events show that such a revolution never took place.Simmer's theory of electricity and Marat's theory of optics are two examples.Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 2, in many instances scientific revolutionary movements never developed into full-scale revolutions—hypnosis, N-rays, and polymerized water, to name a few. That's it.Therefore, we need further tests to supplement eyewitness testimony. The second test is to examine some of the literature after the subject in which the revolution is said to have taken place.A study of astronomy papers and textbooks written between 1543 and 1609 shows that Copernican's ideas and methods were not adopted.It can thus be said that this test implies that there was no Copernican revolution in those years.In contrast, most of the mathematical writings of the 18th century—whether professional treatises.Newspaper articles or textbooks—both are written according to the new calculus ideas (either Leibniz's rule system or Newton's rule system), thus setting the stage for Fontenelle's invention of calculus as a mathematical revolution. The discussion of the New Era provides corroborating evidence.Similarly, if we contrast and compare mathematical astronomy after 1687 (with a strong gravitational celestial mechanics component) with astronomy before the publication of Principia, we have evidence for Newton's revolution.Apparently, the test itself can, at most, be recombined to such a degree that a subjective judgment can be made as to whether it is sufficient to constitute a scientific revolution.But this test is conclusive against the negative judgment that no such influence is found in the important works of a science.In many cases, the evidence is indeed incontrovertible (for example, in the case of calculus), or at least strongly corroborated.The results of the first two tests taken together strongly suggest to us that a revolution occurred.

The third test is that there is a certain level of judgment of historians, especially historians of science and historians of philosophy.Presumably, not only the judgments of present and recent historians are to be included here, but also the judgments of historians of long ago. The 18th century historian J. -S．An example is Bailly, a historian who has written about events of the sixteenth century related to Copernicus.Historians or scholars with a historian's mind (such as philosophers, sociologists, and other social scientists) are not required to verify Newtonian revolutions, chemical revolutions, or Darwinian revolutions.Combining affirmative answers to all three tests gives a very powerful conviction that these events were revolutions.Historians may generally regard certain periods as revolutionary, but from the prevailing point of view they were not.A major example, which we may mention again, is the Copernican revolution.As we shall see, the idea that a Copernican astronomical revolution had taken place in the sixteenth century was in fact developed by later historians, first of all Montacre and Bailly in the eighteenth century, A fiction invented and preserved.This inconsistency between the testimony of ancient eyewitnesses and the views of later historians may have led historians to warn them to be skeptical of such an unproven revolution.A close analysis of the events in this case will make it clear how the error came about and how it depended on the events connected with Kepler and Galileo, which happened in Copernicus. The publication (1543) of Ney's treatise occurred half a century or more later.However, this is a historical fact after all: for about two centuries, historians and scientists believed that there was a Copernican revolution.Such judgments, made long after events, must be critically examined, especially when they are made in the face of contemporary standards of historical evidence.

I think the judgment that "there was a great scientific revolution in statistics and statistical thinking in the nineteenth century" is a correct historical judgment.From Adolf Keitel, J.Some vague hints of this revolution may be found in the writings of Clark Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, and John Herschel, among others.I don't know, however, how much contemporaries have articulated this revolution (although Herschel commented on it immediately afterwards), as contemporaries did during the chemical revolution and during the Darwinian revolution .What this means may be nothing else than our ignorance, which reflects the rather primitive state of our knowledge of the history of the subject.Since few serious historians are or have been concerned with the development of probability and statistics, the third criterion of revolution does not quite apply here.But there is a fourth and final test which may apply to the statistical revolution, and this is the general opinion of scientists working in this field today.Here, twentieth-century physicists, biologists, and social scientists largely recognized that, in their own time, statistics-based physics (radiation physics and quantum physics), biology (genetics) and the establishment of the social sciences have constituted a clear break with the past, and there has been a revolution in statistics.

In this fourth test, I have given considerable weight to the existing scientific tradition, to the myths that constitute part of the cultural heritage accepted by working scientists.Myths play a meaningful but inappropriate evaluative role in science, a role I'm sure is similar to the role myths play in society in general.Of course, myths about heroes of science and the revolutions they are believed to have brought about do not serve as historical evidence of past events, but they do give us clues that certain important periods did exist, referring to The formative period of scientific development.The scientists' overall view of their past reinforced the evidence provided by the other three tests.

In any case, the fourth test is not independent of the first three.Obviously, scientists can be influenced by historians, and historians can be influenced by scientists.Perhaps scientists and historians alike are obsessed with a long tradition, as in the chemical revolution.Even a tradition built on a false foundation can have a strong influence on subsequent historians and scientists, as was evident in the aforementioned Copernican Revolution. An instructive example is the revolution in earth science in our time, in which all four tests yield the same result.The basic concept of this revolution is that the lands on the Earth's surface have had and still have a relative motion called continental drift.When Alfred Wegener first proposed the theory of continental drift before the war in 1914, it was generally regarded as revolutionary by geoscientists, and it gained traction in the 1920s and 1930s. Widely discussed (although it has not really been accepted by the community of geologists and geophysicists)—thus passing the first test: the views of contemporary scientists.Moreover, Wegener himself was fully aware of the revolutionary nature of his ideas.When the new theory of continental drift, based on the idea of ​​plate tectonics, became part of the beliefs of geoscientists in the 1960s and 1970s, they were willing to describe the change as a revolution.The literature of the earth sciences attests that a dramatic change has taken place in the discipline, and it is no different from a revolution.In this way, the theory of continental drift has passed the second and fourth tests.Finally, in the third test we may note that historians have written works in which the emergence of the idea of ​​continental drift, and its acknowledgment, is described as a scientific revolution.When discussing the theory of continental drift, many historians and scientists even cite Kuhn's ideas to describe this problem with paradigms and paradigm shifts.Now that all our tests are taken into account in this example, is there any doubt that a revolution has taken place?The theory of continental drift passes all the tests of a critique revolution.

The testimonies of my contemporaries are of great importance to me.Contrary to posterity's judgment, which considers the revolutionary cause less than its long-term effects or the history of science after the revolution, contemporaneous witnesses offer an account of the work in progress. Direct insight into your career.For example, the fact that Darwin not only believed his new ideas would lead to a revolution, but actually said so in his conclusions, published in 1859, is very relevant.He foresees "a great revolution in natural history," a scientist such as he who makes such a statement in published work (in this case, in a major publication announcing the discovery) It is rare.Darwin's judgment was echoed by a large number of people who agreed with him.Lavoisier's and Darwin's account of the revolution underlying their respective thought was supported respectively not only by the deterministic judgments of their contemporaries but also by the evaluations of subsequent historians and scientists.However, self-assessments may be unreliable.Few scientists and historians know Robert Semmel, and those who do have a hard time agreeing with him that his contributions to electricity were "revolutionary." The most convincing verdict: Jean-Paul Marat, whatever he may say, never caused a revolution in science.

Few scientists seem to describe their work as revolutionary.I have been working on this problem for about 15 years, with the help of many students and friends, as well as the work of some research assistants, and these years of research have shown that the There are no more than a dozen cases in which scientists have outspokenly called their contributions revolutionary (or believed that their contributions will lead to a revolution, and their contributions are an integral part of a revolution). In chronological order, these scientists are Are: Robert Seymour, J. -P．Mara, A. -L．Lavoisier, Justus von Liebig, William Ron Hamilton, Charles Darwin, Rudolph Fierschau, Georges Cantor, Albert Einstein, Hermann Min Kowski, Max von Laue, Alfred Wegener, Arthur H.Compton, Ernest Everett Just, James D.Watson, and Benoit Mandelbrot. There are, of course, men who have also remarkably stated that they have founded a new science (Tartaria, Galileo) or a new astronomy (Kepler), or have invented A "new approach to philosophizing" (Giber).We do not expect to find many references to the Scientific Revolution before the end of the seventeenth century.Of the three eighteenth-century scientists who claimed to be causing a revolution, Lavoisier alone managed to have his work equally appreciated by his contemporaries and later historians and scientists. Evidence for scientific revolutions from contemporaneous observers or participants is obviously not very reliable to a certain extent.Evidence left over from an earlier period may be incidental; even if it exists in some tangible form (published records, diaries, notes, correspondence, and the like), it may still remain hidden from historians today. Know.The absence of such a clear indication that a revolution has occurred (or is about to occur) in the literature cannot always be used as a kind of conclusive evidence that a revolution did not occur.In other words, such contemporaneous evidence is a sufficient, but not always necessary, condition for our judgment that a revolution has occurred. Information gained from an ongoing discussion may be very valuable. A case in point is the 1858 Annual Report of the President of the Linnean Society of London, the year Darwin and Wallace published their first mutual exchange on the question of the evolution of species by natural selection.However, the president said that the past year was not known for a revolution that changed the face of a certain science.Should we suppose that he was extremely slow to respond to the revolutionary implications of the theory of evolution?It doesn't have to be.For, as we shall see, his report shows that he believed in a revolution in the sciences, and he suspected that the time was ripe for a major revolution in the life sciences.In this light, what his statement was trying to show was that the great Darwinian revolution did not come about simply by announcing bold ideas about evolution and natural selection.For an impending revolution, careful and comprehensive documentation was needed, as well as a very complete theory, as Darwin provided a year later in his work.The mere formulation of radical ideas did not lead to a Darwinian revolution. A Darwinian revolution was triggered by the interplay of vast amounts of factual data and high-level theoretical reasoning.Admittedly, these four criteria are ultimately subjective.Obviously, they do not apply to every possible contingency.They do, however, at least provide the conditions under which we can judge whether a revolution has occurred, a judgment that may be supported by further research and critical reflection.