STS3301 Paper Week 1

My Primer for Discussion 1, September 1-3, 2009, Making of Modern Science:Physical Sciences Readings: Kuhn, T.S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [page numbers (in parentheses) here refer to the first edition]; Smith, Crosbie, The Science of Energy:A cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain.

In keeping with the stated wishes of the instructor, I will refrain from viewing the instructors inquiries about the readings until I complete this primer. I will write about my own reactions to several arguments presented by Kuhn, the scenario described in the first chapter of Crosbie, place the two in a boxing ring, and consider sometimes both writings' meaning for me as a physics teacher and curriculum reformer. I will simultaneously consider revolutionary moments mentioned in lecture 20090901, through lenses Kuhn provides. Many of the issues raised are not resolved, instead they might be considered questions for further study, at least clarification by more focused research.

Kuhn points out the newly-fruitful research of his contemporary historians on relations between historical figures and their contemporaries, rather than the staler comparisons between historical scientists and modern understanding of science. His new school of historians were less concerned with how science had to "improve" to get from Galileo to Einstein, more with how Galileo was able to think and act as he did in his own milieu, likewise for Einstein. Ironically, this line of thinking, while severing that one connection to past worlds, may, in my view, serve the current world better by uncovering the ways great science surfaces. Kuhn presents a "revolution" as an upsetting of a dominant paradigm by another, or the first establishment of a paradigm where there was none before. The bulk of his essay explores the history of physics through this lens.

In his introduction, Kuhn proposes his "revolutions" not only as alternative to accretion of understanding, he writes that a new theory is "seldom or never just an increment to what is already known." (7) A new theory not only opens the door to new facts, it shifts the view of known facts.

Also, of revolutions, he asks us to replace the idea that scientific work either confirms or falsifies hypotheses with the idea that scientific ideas compete, usually between establishment and revolutionary. Before the establishment of any dominant paradigm in a specific field, there may be many several pre-paradigms competing, not yet dominant because of isolation or weakness. (8) For example, before (Dutch) lensmaking (Kuhn writes "before Newton"), there was no dominant paradigm in optics. (13)

Kuhn can certainly produce many pieces of supporting evidence, but is the treatment universal, or as we consider Crosbie below, is the treatment inclusive of all a historian can derive from a story? Take this statement: "On occasions, a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails to perform in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot, despite repeated effort, be aligned with professional expectation." (5,6) Is this the case with Boyle and the Royal Society research into Anomalous Suspension? (Discussed in class September 1.) Or, did Boyle et al. even have what Kuhn calls "basic commitments" or just shallow commitments to the mercury-informed problem of a vacuum; i.e., was there a paradigm established by the experiments and theorizing on mercury in a double vacuum, or was there in fact no dominant paradigm yet in this specific field of study to put up a more protracted defense against Hooke's results? Despite the stammering rejections of the anomaly, it must be emphasized that Boyle et al. eventually accepted the results, so a revolution need not be the wresting of power from one group of people by another. Kuhn's lens appears useful here, at least intellectually in raising questions. In chapter 6, Kuhn shows how normal science (an accepted paradigm), in focusing pursuits but allowing for unpredictable development of precision, paves the way for its own replacement. Galileo, in aquiring an instrument and using it to increase the precision of astronomical observations, discovered four stars that moved with Jupiter. At first he was just cataloging previously unseen stars but seeing the Medicean stars served the Copernican Revolution. Likewise, "Maxwell's theory, despite its Newtonian origin, ultimately produced a crisis for the paradigm from which it sprung." (74) Kuhn, focusing on the change, writes that scientific revolution, often portrayed as discovery, may more often be a rejection or sometimes a demolition of a previously well-established science. (3) Interestingly, although writing about an earlier Kuhn writing, faults Kuhn for holding an image of an absolute science waiting to be discovered. (11,12) Crosbie writes that scientists don't discover a truth, they construct an interpretation of a socially important phenomenon. Whereas Kuhn focuses on work being done in the philosophic society (one might say in the dominant paradigm), Crosbie widens his aperture to allow in the entire social milieu of the scientist. The impact of science on society might be measured not by the novelty of a discovery but by the social acceptance of of both the question and the answer of the scientist. Thus, the science of energy, with so much socially anticipated value, was allowed to grow to become an overarching theme of natural philosophy, even including parts of geology and biology.

Crosbie also begins to describe the importance of social networks in energy science, scientists feeding each other with credibility.(4)

To consider:

1. In physics education, we force our students to revisit, implicitly, and in chronological order, several centuries of scientific revolutions, always starting with Galilean-Newtonian kinematics presented in the language of 19th century math. Since my second year of teaching, I have questioned the canonization of this sequence, wondering whether students could be expected to learn much if anything about the nature of physical science when blasted with so much re-contextualized and de-contextualized formulae and ideas. But this is the indoctrination that gives us the physicists we have today, I admit a defensible position. But demographic and retention problems in physics are not solved by this indoctrination.
2. A paradigm's central ideas are not wrong in their own realm, but the replacement paradigm can ask questions that the original would incorrectly answer.(Kuhn, 97-101) Newton's was correct in answering Halley's question, but not in answering, say, Hubble's.
   Observation, analysis, and inference occur within a locus of understanding, say, a paradigm. Two differing scientists aren't merely having two different interpretations of the exact same phenomena, they are thinking of somewhat different schemes with different goals.(Kuhn, 121)
   Perhaps this history of science will help science teachers struggling with constructivism.
3. The history-repeating sequence of introductory physics textbooks, following the dominant paradigms of physics from 1600 to 1900, Kuhn says are pedagogically ok.(139) But such serial development of ideas belies human history. As Kuhn suggests historians do, I would prefer textbooks present scientists as struggling through revolutions of ideas, going through periods of satisfaction in the dominant paradigm. Ethnographic science education research has shown that students feel disconnected from successful scientists and research professors, thinking of those people as a different class of being. Specifically, when a research professor discusses troubles in her own research, students have improved their scores and, in end-of-term surveys, attributed a better sense of the subject to the professor's openness.
4. If scientific paradigms are subject to the ebb and flow of social pressures, have classical geology, classical macrobiology, and classical evolution paradigms been prematurely discarded by scientists for social reasons, leaving the laity without enough of a sail to guide them to some truth, thus all the gnashing of teeth over earth and man's complete history? In other words, has the movement of the vanguard of the biological sciences to molecular biology, attributable to interest in health sciences, DNA testing, etc., left not enough respected biologists studying evolution to defend it in the public scrutiny, or was Darwinism never a powerful enough paradigm for people to accept as they do the existence of atmosphere or chlorophyll?