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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | "floatingunder" <underthefloat@msn.com> |
| Subject | OT Re: New Year's Top Tens... |
| Date | Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:20:33 -0000 |
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--- In audities@yahoogroups.com, "floatingunder" <underthefloat@...>
wrote:
>
>
Link didn't work...
so here it is (FWIW)..sorry off topic:
Why progress is a life and death issue
Science Notebook examines a theory on the adoption of new ideas
Anjana Ahuja
By rights, on this New Year's Eve, I should be gazing into the future
on your behalf. Instead, I must bring you news of a credible, if
somewhat cheerless, theory about how science advances.
It is not through reason and rational debate that it creeps forward,
but by death. Which is, when you think about it, rather obvious:
youthful ideas march into established territory, to the dismay of the
old guard. Rarely do the guardians of the status quo convert; they go
to their graves sticking stubbornly to their beliefs. Only in their
absence can fresh ideas bloom and take hold.
This hypothesis comes from the astronomer David Weintraub, the author
of Is Pluto a Planet? (Princeton University Press) and expanded on
most entertainingly by Joe Shuster, who reviewed the book for Sky &
Telescope. Pluto was demoted to "dwarf planet" status in 2006,
leading to a split in the astronomy community that Shuster thinks
might not heal until the present generation keels over.
Shuster writes: "Do you think the Inquisitors who put Galileo under
house arrest later reread his work and said, 'Oh, now I get it'? Not
a chance, they ... died with the same anti-Copernican bias they
exhibited at his trial."
The longer we live, Shuster supposes, the slower the rate of
intellectual advancement. And in a land of immortals, we would see
very little progress indeed. Thank goodness Albert Einstein and Isaac
Newton were separated by two centuries; who would have believed the
crazy ideas of a self-taught patent clerk over a knighted genius,
even though Einstein was right?
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