Thursday, January 21, 2010

astronomy

Hello everyone - wishing you a very prosperous digital new year!

It's been a while since we enjoyed the quite sophisticated blog exchanges that took place toward the end of last semester. I intend to draw on the combined wisdom to be found there and write some comments that I hope will generate some further discussion on those topics and beyond, but, for now, here is something else.

The following link will take you to a book review, of sorts:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/dec/17/galileo-seeing-believing-richard-panek

Please read the piece and see if you can make some connections to our TOK discussions - both recent and older. Think about some of the concepts we have covered.

The most important question is - what can we learn about the nature of the natural sciences from this story?

Hope to see some discussion emerging...

JHK

5 comments:

  1. This reviews proves that more and more science is less about making brand new discoveries and more about building on what we already know. It is about progression. A lot of what we know about astronomy was learnt through careful observation.
    One thing that I think is important to note is that often throughout the course of history when a scientific 'discovvery' that the world is not yet ready to deal with it is labeled as heretic and supernatural. Such as was the case with the astronomers. The more we know the more realize that the less we know.

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  2. One thing which is obvious from this article is the spate at which scientific discoveries make groundbreaking claims about a reality we thought we knew so well. Two words describing the rate of scientific discovery which caught my attention were “disorderly progress”. These two words stringed together, adequately convey the wave of the scientific discoveries made over the past decade and over. I have often been awed at how science transforms our understanding of the world as compared to what we used to make of our reality merely 5 years ago. If you look back through the history of science, you will be overwhelmed! The shift in paradigms is almost as drastic as reversing the order of night and day.(okay that may not be so good an analogy depending on how you choose to look at your day..oops!)Anyway,this is what has spurred my interest in the sciences…that any man, be it a mere college Physics student like Gell-Mann, or a certified scientist like Galileo, can fathom something branded unfathomable and suddenly what he sees/predicts comes to life...First a hypothesis; then a test; then the test generates results et le voila!... A conclusive result ,births a new theory or law, that penetrates through the world of science, for centuries and decades to come.

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  3. This article clearly proves that once a discovery is made, it just doesn’t end there. There are more things associated that need to be explained. It was rather ridiculous of Galileo to pride in the thought that he had uncovered everything there was in the sky.
    One of my mates asked once in our TOK class why our generation was not making any discoveries like Einstein and Galileo. We sometimes believe that everything we need to know has already being discovered. That is partly true but we can still go the extra mile to discover something more. Galileo was not the first to invent the telescope or to look at the heavens through a spyglass yet he contributed tremendously to astronomy.

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  4. I think it is also a bit more difficult now to make new and amazing (or groundbreaking) discoveries such as those Einstein and Galileo made in their time, which is why our generation may not seem to be doing as much as they did.

    From the article, I think what it basically shows us is that science is progressive. The great scientists we know built their findings on earlier knowledge and used other information found by other scientists.

    Another thing is, we can hardly ever be sure that our discoveries end where we think they do.

    And last of all, it takes quite a lot of research and work for scientists to construct and shape the knowledge we have in the natural sciences so that everything fits together and it makes sense. In my opinion, most of us do not exactly realize that the conclusions that have been arrived at in this area of knowledge were not straightforward and did not immediately follow the explorations undertaken by earlier scientists. Sometimes, they get to a point where there are obstacles, or something contradicts what was previously accepted, or they have to go back in order to add to previous knowledge. I think this has to do with the "disorderly progress" mentioned in the article to some extent.

    But one of the most important things I think we ought to do is constantly appreciate the work our predecessors carried out in the natural sciences, especially since it has helped us to understand our world much better.

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  5. Some very interesting observations here.

    When we consider Thomas Kuhn and his ideas about the way science happens, it is perhaps easy to overstate the case. While there are well-documented historical cases (what are they?) of paradigms (remember - sets of beliefs and assumptions held by practitioners in the field) being overthrown, this does not mean that everything we think we know in science is likely to be overthrown at some apocalyptic future date! There is a very strong argument to be made that, even though scientific knowledge is provisional in the sense that it is always open to revision in the light of new evidence, it is largely cumulative, building securely on what has already been discovered. I think Tori's highlighting of the term "disorderly progress" does indeed seem to capture something of reality. Note here that the term "progress" implies "moving forward" in some sense - would this mean that, in the case of a paradigm shift, the new paradigm would have to be closer to the truth?

    On the other hand, as Ntiriwa warns, we as knowers, just like professional scientists, need to guard against hubris - from the article, it seems that Galileo suffered from some of this. There is the famous example of physics in the late 19th century, when many physicists appear to have believed that the subject was close to being completed - very soon physics would be "done", everything known and explained. Lord Kelvin (of temperature scale fame) is reputed to have said "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now - all that remains is more and more precise measurement" (although noone can provide a citation!) How that idea was undermined is an interesting story in itself.

    Finally, Andrea's point about how perhaps it is more difficult nowadays to make breakthroughs in knowledge is instructive. Could this be because our knowledge has expanded so far that it is difficult to know everything you need to know in order to make progress? There was a time, a few centuries ago, when it was possible to be an expert in just about all intellectual fields, but that time has passed. It was supposedly Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian ethologist, who said something like "each of us gets to know more and more about less and less until finally we know everything about nothing"! Does this "price of specialization" undermine our efforts to make discoveries through seeing the "big picture"? And then it seems that new discoveries in science often require elaborate teamwork and sophisticated technology...

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