Chapter 8 Chapter 6 The Second Scientific Revolution and Other Revolutions?

The scientific revolution discussed in this book is a revolution affecting all scientific knowledge, and in this respect it differs neither from the other revolutions discussed in this book nor from those discussed in most works on the history of science .It revolutionized the foundations of science, placing emphasis on experiment and observation; it promoted the ideal of a new mathematical theory, emphasized the importance of foresight, and proclaimed that future discoveries would not only Knowledge of ourselves and our world advances, but also increases the extent of our control over the workings of nature.Along with it came a revolution in the organization.Awareness of revolutions in ideas and institutions on such a large scale naturally leads historians of science and other scholars interested in history to ask: have there been (or will be) other such revolutions in science?

revolution in scientific institutions We learned in Chapter 5 that an important revolutionary feature of the scientific revolution has been the rise of the scientific community, exemplified by the establishment of various scientific organizations and institutions.In the early decades of the 19th century, those long-established scientific organizations and institutions - the Royal Society.The Paris Academy of Sciences, with their smaller brethren in Berlin, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere -- could no longer accommodate the large increase in dynamic scientists.As a result, scientific organizations and professional scientific journals in many places have emerged, such as the "Journal of Physics" in France, and the "Journal of Philosophy" published in the UK for the physics community.As the number of scientists and adherents of the scientific cause proliferated, professional scientific organizations such as the Society of British Geologists emerged.Roger Hahn (1971, 275) described the enormous increase in the number of scientific professionals and the various institutions that supported them as "the second scientific revolution of the early nineteenth century."

The British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1831, and it also has corresponding organizations in France, the United States, Germany and other countries.Its members are unlimited, and it can even be said that it is an organization that recruits talents.By working with local groups, holding an annual meeting in one city, with the aim of eventually enabling national membership in the Science Movement, these agencies drive Science Advancement.At its meetings, the BASC standard body is divided into scientific groups (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.), as are the proceedings that are published each year.Of course, there are always a few general presentations and important presentations during the conference, and there are even sessions that may be of interest to a wider audience.The most famous example of the latter is the BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of Science - Translator) Oxford Conference of 1860, at which Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley discussed Darwin's The theory of evolution was debated.

I think a good case can be made for the third scientific revolution that took place during the decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Much of this revolution is also an institutional one.First, universities did become centers of large-scale research and higher education during this time, a pattern that has developed over the past 100-odd years or so.Self-taught scientists—lay academics like Faraday and Darwin—were gradually replaced by those with specialized knowledge, advanced scientific training, and graduate degrees (M.A., Ph.D., Doctor of Science, etc.).Newer universities, like Johns Hopkins, were created to sponsor postgraduate study and research, while the older ones had research institutes.Examples of the latter include the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, the Yerkes Observatory in Chicago, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.Many of these research departments are not directly related to universities, such as the Cold Spring Harbor Genetics Laboratory, the Carnegie Institution in Washington, and the Rockefeller Institute in the United States, the Pasteur Institute in France, and Germany. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Nernst, Planck and Einstein all worked here.

The era of the third scientific revolution is precisely the period when various scientific research and management institutions are established and expanded in a controlled manner.Perhaps most important, however, this period saw the large-scale application of the results of industrial laboratories and scientific research for the purpose of developing new products, as well as the transformation of existing product manufacturing and the establishment of standards.The first industry that produced astonishing economic and social benefits from the cooperation of science and technology is pigment chemistry. One of the most meaningful aspects of the German pigment chemistry revolution in the late 19th century was that universities, industry, and the government worked together to develop end products with practical benefits.Science-based technological advances that require the cooperation of different research institutions have become an inherent feature of our society.

Mention of management takes us directly to what I consider to be the fourth scientific revolution, which took place in the years since World War II.Two important institutional features of this revolution are large government spending (as in the United States in the 1960s, which accounted for 3 percent of GNP) and organized research.Both of these features of the Fourth Scientific Revolution can probably be traced back to the World War II era of the invention of the atomic bomb and the enormous expense of producing it (along with less costly but massively produced devices such as radar, near-explosive fuzes), and the enormous costs of development and production of various antimicrobials.Today, in some branches of science (most notably high-energy physics and space research), the state of knowledge is directly linked to the amount of money governments are willing to spend on a scientific research project.In the 19th century, Darwin lived in Darwin House on the outskirts of London for decades, where he conducted research and thinking alone, and occasionally did some experiments with little cost but great significance; It is very strange and unbelievable to today's scientists as scientific research.The difference is that most of the time and energy of scientists today are not spent on direct research at all, but on making transfer plans, consulting scientific treatises and transfer plans written by other scientists, writing status reports, Attend committee meetings, travel abroad or abroad to attend formal and informal conferences and seminars, and other scientific congresses.

During the period of the third scientific revolution, various specialized scientific societies sprung up one after another, including not only academic organizations such as the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society, but also some professional groups within disciplines, for example, The Optical Society of America, the American Society for Rheology, and the Society of Plant Physiologists, among others.These organizations provide funding for general scientific journals (Physical Review, Review of Modern Physics) and various professional publications.The fourth scientific revolution is marked by newer forms of scientific communication.These new formats included the mass distribution of pre-publication informal samples reproduced by photocopiers, sometimes even the journal's agreement to use previous articles, and the publication of short papers (relative to its authoritative predecessor, the Physical Review ). Communications in this area can be published much more quickly than the Physical Review Letters).There were also well-functioning communication networks among researchers working on the same or different projects, groups of the kind that Derek Dexrano Rice Sr. called invisible academies.Given the importance of financial support for "big science" today, new (or revamped) agencies have been created (or revamped) within the government to be responsible for the organization of the government's research grants.Valuation and allocation.In the United States, in addition to the specially established National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health, there are also funding agencies in the land, sea and air forces, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Atomic Energy Commission.

Revolution of Ideas in Science So far, the four scientific revolutions have been described almost exclusively in terms of their institutional characteristics.However, these four revolutions were more or less always accompanied by some changes in scientific thinking at the same time.The scientific revolution established experiments and observations as the basis for our understanding of nature, and showed that the development of mathematics is the key to solving scientific problems, and mathematics is the highest form of expressing science.The revolution culminated in the publication of Newton's Principia, whose full title expresses the purpose of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others: to demonstrate the "mathematical principles of natural philosophy."In the following century and a half, the work of mathematicizing the state of nature continued, and was most successful in the fields of theoretical mechanics and astronomy; however, the great chemical revolution of the eighteenth century did not end with Newton's mathematical model.The wave theory of light developed by Augustan Fresnel in the 1820s became another area of ​​Newtonian physics in this sense.Newton's model can be described as the pinnacle of the first scientific revolution, but obviously, it cannot be simply transferred to other branches of science.

In a thorough discussion of this subject, T. S．Kuhn (1977, 220) draws our attention to "an important change in the character of research work in many branches of the physical sciences" which occurred sometime between 1800 and 1850, "especially in some In a series of studies in those areas of physics." Kuhn said that this change in the "Baconian mathematization of physical science" is "an aspect of the second scientific revolution." Kuhn emphasized this fact, That is to say, "mathematization" is only "one aspect" of the second scientific revolution: "The first half of the 19th century also proved the enormous growth of the scientific enterprise in terms of scale, important changes in the form of scientific organization, and the comprehensive construction of scientific education." Kuhn quite rightly emphasized the fact that "these changes affected all sciences in almost the same way".Therefore, to "explain the characteristics of the newly mathematicized science of the nineteenth century that distinguishes it from other sciences of the same period", some other factors must be considered.

Ian Harkin (1983, 493) promoted in a striking manner the ideas of intellectual revolution and institutional change that Kuhn alluded to.Hacking considered this scientific revolution and what Kuhn called the second "Great Revolution," and he proposed a "primary empirical rule" that every Great Revolution must be accompanied by " A new institution that centralizes new tendencies." According to this analysis, the Second Scientific Revolution includes not only what Kuhn called the mathematization of Bacon's science, but also Darwin's theory of natural history as a new biology appear.Darwinian biology is unique in terms of system and thought.It draws heavily on information collected for non-scientific purposes by non-scientists, namely, the records and experiences of breeders and breeders of plants and animals, and it creates, in essence, a non-Newtonian science.This is the first important scientific theory of modern times, and although it happened for a reason, there was no precursor.As much as biologists and naturalists longed for their own Newton, the fact was that when their "Newton," Charles Robert Darwin, came along, his theories did not have the essential features of science that Principia calls science.Darwin pointed out that not all ways of scientific progress necessarily have the mathematical characteristics of the Newtonian model, and that great progress in science may also proceed in a non-mathematical Baconian way.Moreover, I think that the form of discussion after publication in 1859 was an aspect of the large-scale participation of society in science, which was a feature of the well-ordered institutions of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Were the third and fourth scientific revolutions also accompanied by changes in scientific thought?Are such changes also characteristic of these two revolutions?This is a difficult question to answer.The third scientific revolution covers a wide range of areas, including three great revolutions in physics (Maxwell revolution, great relativity revolution, and quantum mechanics revolution), several chemical revolutions, and revolutions in life sciences. The revolution in meaning was probably the creation of the science of genetics. If I had to single out a single characteristic, it would be the one that applies to characterizing Maxwell (though not exactly his revolutionary field theory), Einstein (but not revolution in relativity) and contributions from quantum mechanics and genetics, etc., then this feature is the introduction of probability. In this sense, just as the first scientific revolution was entirely governed by the simple Newtonian-one-to-one correspondence of physical events As governed by causality, the Third Scientific Revolution is a period in which many fields of science, including the social sciences, introduce groups of theories and explanations that are based on probability theory rather than simple causality of. For the fourth scientific revolution, it is difficult to imagine a single characteristic that could be the hallmark of its thought.However, it is important to note the fact that a considerable part (though not all) of biology can be regarded as simply a branch of applied physics and chemistry.At the same time, perhaps the most revolutionary general feature of thought in the field of physics was the abandonment of the illusion that there was a world of purely elementary particles between which there were only electrical interactions. It is dangerous to overemphasize the simultaneity of the four institutional revolutions and the four conceptual revolutions in science, nevertheless, it is hoped that someday it will be possible to distinguish between changes in the content of ideas and in the style of science, between changes in the institutions of scientific research and The idea of ​​some causal relationship between changes in patterns remains attractive. What Historians Say About Other Great Scientific Revolutions As far as I know, the term "Second Scientific Revolution" was coined by T. S．Introduced by Kuhn in the literature of the history of science. Kuhn used the term in a 1961 paper in the journal Isis on the role of measurement in physics.Kuhn's article (1977, 178ff) was originally a paper submitted to the Association of American Societies Symposium on Measurement Problems.Other authors may have mentioned the Second Scientific Revolution in different senses before Kuhn; but I can conclude that it was through Kuhn's discussion that the term officially entered into discussions on the history of science, philosophy of science, and science in sociological discourse. Roger Hahn's idea of ​​a second revolution came earlier, but it was very different from Kuhn's.Hahn's view, found in his famous study of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1971, 275ff.), sees the Second Scientific Revolution as "a crucial social change which brought science into a more mature phase, and, like the first revolution of the seventeenth century, it transcended national boundaries." In his description, Hahn does not discuss the actual development of science during the Second Scientific Revolution, focusing instead on the Institutional changes that characterize the "decline and decline of the general academic society and the rise of more specialized institutions" and the "simultaneous establishment of professional standards in disparate scientific disciplines." Accompanying the Second Scientific Revolution It is the emergence of various universities and research institutions, especially the emergence of "professional science" research "in institutions of higher learning".This is the case in this era, when "specialized laboratories" have gradually replaced "the various societies that have dominated this arena for centuries." Hahn draws our attention in particular to the enormous expansion of the scientific community, a factor of size that, in itself, "forces a differentiation of institutions." He finds that the production and development of specialization is the result of "increasing specialization of academic problems" in the sciences. the corollary of "specialization" and, at the same time, "the product of the experimental requirements peculiar to each subject." Finally, Hahn also links the rise of specialization with the "continuous narrowing of the gap between science and its immediate application," This shrinking factor tends to "tend the role of general science (relative to specialized science) to diminish where technical expertise is required." Hahn saw a serious problem in education; In order to function properly, a "fully educated engineer or doctor" needs to specialize knowledge to the highest possible degree, so that "it is impossible to expect at the same time to be helpful to the old general science, namely natural philosophy." deep understanding." Another historian who has explored other scientific revolutions is Hugh Carney (1964, 151-155).He hinted that the "scientific activity" of ancient China and Greece "may be regarded with some justice as a revolution" and that, since Newton's time, "there have been other scientific revolutions." He found that in At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there was a great revolution similar to the Copernican revolution, the Galileo revolution, and the Newton revolution: "The Galileo of this scientific revolution is the Scotsman Clark Maxwell, and its Padua "It's the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, and its Kepler is Einstein.Mentioning this revolution, people will also think of other people, such as Lord Rayleigh,) Rutherford, Bohr, Schrodinger and Heisenberg, etc., "In this discussion, Carney's following statement is very interesting: "Whatever your view on the importance of universities in the first scientific revolution, the pre-eminent role of universities in the second revolution seems indisputable. "He also pointed out that "the relationship between government sponsorship of science and the second scientific revolution deserves our attention." "Finally, in the "Postscript" to the book, he offers the insight that "there was also a third scientific revolution in the nineteenth century, whose characteristics had nothing in common with those occurring in the field of Faraday and Clark Maxwell place. "He explained this as follows: "The nineteenth century also experienced an equally thorough revolution in the discussion of time... first the age of the earth, then the age of man, and then the age of the universe, which were eventually as a new category of historical inquiry.This unique revolution in the way we think about the universe is as profound as the mathematical revolution of the seventeenth century. "However, unlike Carney's second revolution, this third scientific revolution did not include innovations in professional institutions. Also, he did not include the great Darwinian revolution in his introduction, which was limited to the field of physics However, he does raise a very important thesis, namely, that by the "mid-20th century," historians no longer believed that "the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton" "constituted a uniquely human A scientific revolution unprecedented in history. " In an essay by Everett Mendelsohn on "The Ins and Outs of Nineteenth Century Science" (Jones 1966), there is also a statement of the Second Scientific Revolution.In this part of his statement, Mendelssohn stresses the changes "in the social structure of nineteenth-century science," focusing his attention on the development of new journals, new scientific associations, and two types of organizations: one is the foundation Broad scientific organizations such as the British Society, and other emerging organizations dedicated to specialized research in particular sub-disciplines of science.Speaking of "those changes in the institutions of society in which science is practiced," he suggested that they might be called a "second scientific revolution."For him, this revolution can be described as a fundamental change in the characteristics of the typical scientific worker.Mendelsohn pointed out that in the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists were mostly amateurs.That is to say, they do not earn their living by the practice of science, they are either wealthy unemployed people, or they earn their living in some entirely different trade (medicine, commerce, shipbuilding, etc.).In the 19th century, scientists gradually began to emerge from the middle or even lower classes of society. Therefore, "in the practice of science itself, scientists in the 19th century had to seek support for their scientific activities." This change A notable feature of the study is that the scientific community "considers the professional needs of its members" and, as a result, "spent a great deal of time seeking recognition and support for scientists." Historian Stephen Brash (1982) also offers his own perspective on the two scientific revolutions.He believes that the first scientific revolution "occurred between 1500 and 1800, and it was the product of the research work of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Lavoisier; "the second revolution occurred between 1800 and 1950. At one time, it was "caused by Dalton, Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Freud, and many others." He asserts that "only twice has our civilized world encountered a comprehensive A Revolution of Meaning." I think that what Brash calls the second scientific revolution is the second-longest of all the revolutions that have been pointed out to have occurred in history; it happens to be the longest Half of the longest revolutions of this kind, the longest revolution, the one that Rupert Hall first pointed out lasted 300 years from 1500 to 1800.Just as he could see that Copernicus had similar reasons for favoring the earth pressure system and Einstein for special relativity, Brash's comparison of Darwin and Darwinism with the "revolution in physics" of the twentieth century is also evocative. troubled.Still, considering these questions, and Brash's concluding remarks about a possible third scientific revolution in the future, perhaps takes us too far.In any case, it seems to me too much to lump together indiscriminately what happened between 1500 and 1800 as constituting a single scientific revolution of significance. Enrique Peron wrote a book on "The Study of the Second Scientific Revolution" under the general title "The World in Works" (Italian edition 1976; English translation 1980).It is difficult to articulate in a few words exactly what the second scientific revolution that Peron envisions is.In his view, the revolution originated sometime during the decades between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. "Growing awareness of the need for a radical change in the mechanistic view of the world," was an integral part of this revolution.He found that "the prerequisite for overthrowing this scientific world view" is to conduct a series of investigations and studies on "various natural phenomena", which leads people to "the cosmic clock that understands the universe as having no beginning and no end." belief" creates doubt.Out of "this revolution" emerged a "new worldview, according to which things no longer repeat in cyclical patterns and are no longer governed by hard and fast rules." By contrast The new world, then, is "subject to a process of evolution which affects both organic and inorganic forms of matter." The "mechanistic tradition" revealed in the formulation of this new thought "Those problems and contradictions, people have made "unremitting efforts", these efforts "and the thinking about scientific explanation they caused" are the basis of "this second scientific revolution". The revolution began with "the emergence of new theories of thermodynamics, radiation theory, electromagnetic field theory, and statistical mechanics." Peron found that all these theories had one thing in common, which was that they "proposed the structure of matter and the physical the question of the true meaning of the laws," and in this way transformed the Galileo-Newtonian tradition.Although this was essentially a revolution in physics, involving "a comprehensive rethinking of the foundations of mechanics," the history of the nineteenth century shows that this "new worldview in the field of physics" had "impressed on other sciences, such as biology, Chemistry and geometry had a profound impact. Peron said his "intent" was "to demonstrate the revolutionary nature of 19th-century classical physics," although he insisted that this "does not necessarily detract from what is commonly called relativity and quantum mechanics as innovative." He even argues that "the physics of our century" should be seen as "a product of the most intractable problems of the revolution that began at the end of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth." Peron concluded, "This A second scientific revolution is still underway today." In an insightful review of Peron's book, Stephen Brash begins with his own definition of "this second scientific revolution"—the second scientific Revolutions are "those historical events in which quantum mechanics and relativity were recognized as fundamental to physics and replaced Newtonian physics with them." Most scientists and historians of science agree that these events occurred during the period from 1887 to 1927 (though not necessarily all calling them a "second scientific revolution" or even a continuous "scientific revolution")—in 1887 and 1927 the Michelson-Mo The results of Ray's experiment and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle were published successively.In his description, Brash contrasts Peron's interpretation with more common analyses.Often, the focus is on "the failure of mechanistic or deterministic worldviews, and the proliferation of surprising experimental results that have forced the abandonment of classical notions of space, time, matter, and energy." However, as Burr As Rush points out, Peron argues that "the second scientific revolution actually began long before the nineteenth century." Moreover, this revolution "was not the result of the decline of mechanism or of a particular set of experiments , but an outgrowth of the emergence of mathematical theory as the source of scientific problems and objective knowledge." Kuhn and Peron saw the second scientific revolution in terms of the relationship between mathematics and physics (obviously they were not talking about the same revolution), and they did not mention revolutionary institutional changes at all.Hahn emphasized that institutional change was an important feature of the second scientific revolution.Mendelssohn also emphasized the institutional or sociological character of the Second Scientific Revolution.Carney was primarily concerned with changes in physics, but he noted that in the 19th century, different peoples had different scientific traditions, and that government support for science varied from country to country.Only Ian Harkin has made the remarkable and bold leap of understanding to point out the connection between the second scientific revolution in ideas and the second scientific revolution in institutions.