How Do Scientific Revolutions Happen?
Notes on the philosophy of science
Hello reader,
You may have hesitated while opening this mail because it has the word ‘science’. I know. Just the word contains pure PTSD vibes.
But don’t worry, we’re not going to get into equations that will bring painful memories of fail grades and rustication threats from your prof because you flunked a course 18 times.
Instead, we’ll talk about the enterprise of science and the philosophy behind this entire thing.
How does science as a discipline work? What do scientists do, apart from looking like anti-social nerds and talking in equations?
Let’s dive in and understand, in simple & funny words, how this beast works:
Science can be understood to operate in 3 major phases (I’m oversimplifying things here like I always do) that operate cyclically. First, scientists in a particular field operate with the same overarching paradigm i.e. they all have a common view of how things in their field work. For example, physicists in the 17th century operated with the assumption that Newtonian mechanics explained the world accurately. There were no competing theories. We may call this the normal phase.
But very soon there’s trouble in paradise. Some scientists have started finding issues in the existing, dominant paradigm. Over time, these voices grow and more and more people in the community start noticing these anomalies- like when Einstein realized that not everything could be explained by Newton’s work. But scientists in the community resist this because they’re deeply invested in the current paradigm and all of their research relies on it being true. It’s like walking to the office one day and your boss telling you “Hey son, all your work from the last 7 years isn’t worth horse-shit”. As the anomalies continue to pop up, these scientists make all sorts of modifications in an attempt to save their paradigm from getting overthrown.
This leads to a period of revolution. Alternate paradigms emerge and compete with each other to become the new dominant idea that the entire community adopts. Different communities talk past each other, just like the Left vs. right debate where no real points are made, nobody understands each other and all that is achieved is a bunch of damaged eardrums. These scientific revolutions are just like political revolutions- because the trouble is created because of the nature of the scientific enterprise itself. Because people fight to preserve the status quo. And ultimately, the better idea often prevails because of the influence of some genius scientist.
A good sign of a revolution is when people resort to all sorts of modifications to protect existing theories, when scientists start getting into philosophy and thought experiments, and new paradigms keep floating around. But the community never abandons an existing paradigm without finding a new, suitable one to take its place and explain the world in a whole new light.
An old man brewing a revolution in his basement Once a new paradigm gains acceptance, everyone moves over to it and the old one is abandoned. Thus, what occurs is something that management consultants loosely throw around 15 times a day- a paradigm shift. It is in this context that the phrase has become so popular. It changes how scientists look at the world- just as wearing inverted lenses would shift the way you experience reality.
Once this shift happens, is when the work of ‘normal science’ begins. This is best thought of as mop-up work (as I pointed out in the 2023 Mental Models piece). Regular scientists don’t try to come up with revolutionary, new theories. Quite the opposite. They work to hash out the finer details of the paradigm- making the theory more detailed and doing experiments to prove that the theory is in sync with what’s observed in reality. This is when they start building the details- equations, laws, constants (like the gravitational constant), etc. [You may have noticed that we’ve come full circle back to point #1. A good sign that a community is in this phase is when textbooks get increasingly complicated and only scientists can understand each other’s texts- it means they’ve gone down the rabbit hole of the paradigm and are building deeper layers of explanations that a layperson cannot comprehend.
This detailing work requires lots of investment, high-tech equipment (those intimidating machines in labs that look like the set of a Sci-Fi film with a trillion-dollar budget), and smart-ass folks with a minimum IQ of 200. But here’s the funny thing- the more precision these smartasses bring to the theory with super-detailed equations and precision machinery to do experiments, the more likely they become to notice anomalies and gaps! So the efforts of normal science inherently create conditions that bring us back to the detection of errors and a period of revolution. And that, friends, is how the cycle of science continues.
So any scientific discipline- like optics or atomic physics, isn’t one long tale of scientists building ideas and contributing to the paradigm we may study today. Rather, it’s a process of constant cycles of upgrading paradigms that helped scientists of new generations look at the world in different ways, standing on the shoulders of giants to offer newer paradigms that explain how the world works more accurately.
Thus, the enterprise of science itself operates in a Darwinian way- it can be seen as a struggle between competing ideas, where the best ones get selected while others get relegated to philosophy departments at best or just vanish, at worst. In the meantime, the system continues to adapt and improve, explaining the way nature works more coherently, without any concretely defined end goal (just as life itself doesn’t have any fixed end goal).
That’s it, folks. I hope you learned a thing or two about how scientific revolutions work. To dive deeper, I’d encourage you to read the work of Thomas Kuhn- I’ve based this piece on his landmark book The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions.
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