The best scientific ideas 20 Feb 2010 Over on talk.origins Roger Ebert’s review of The Creation, a film about Darwin’s private life, was mentioned, which starts out Darwin, it is generally agreed, had the most important idea in the history of science. Thinkers had been feeling their way toward it for decades, but it took Darwin to begin with an evident truth and arrive at its evident conclusion: Over the passage of many years, more successful organisms survive better than the less successful. The result is the improvement of future generations. This process he called “natural selection.” I am as big a Darwin booster as anyone, but I demurred. Lacking time to do anything sensible, though, instead I gave my own subjective list of the best ideas in science, which I reproduce below the fold. When I get time, I may add some linkage. IMPORTANT IDEAS IN SCIENCE A subjective list… 1. The Milesians held that things had a nature that determined how they behaved, without the whims of gods. 2. The Empiricists held that we should attend to observations to identify natures. Aristotle did a whole lot of observation, including dissections. 3. Some early medievals held that things were real and classes were just names. This nominalism influenced empirical observation of particulars. 4. Some late medievals, criticising Ptolemaic astronomy and Aristotelian physics, held that we should do actual experiments to test ideas. 5. Renaissance alchemists held to the principle that “as above, so below”, thus making the heavens objects of scientific study, inadvertently. This enabled Galileo to make the argument that the heavens were of the same kind of material that the earth was, rather than a “fifth essence”. 6. Dalton made atomism work. Previously this had been dismissed as irreligious Epicureanism. Now the properties (natures) of things were to be explained in terms of what they were made of, and not what form they had had imposed upon them. 7. Neo-Pythagoreanism in the 17th century allowed Newton to develop the idea that the universe could be explained using mathematics. This enabled him further to suggest that a mathematical quantity, G, could explain the behaviours of things in the heavens. 8. Linnean classification allowed both communication of biologists between each other, and also the idea to develop that these classifications actually meant something about the natural world, and were not just conventions or fictive schemes. 9. Harvey introduced the idea that the biological body was a form of machine. This led the Cartesians to introduce mechanism into scientific explanations of complex phenomena. 10. Adam Smith and James Hutton introduced the idea that complex interactions by individuals might have unintended global equilibria. This led to natural selection. 11. Charles Darwin introduces the idea of common descent, or descent with modification as he called it. 12. Ernst Mach raises the question whether time and space are absolute. 13. Erwin Schrödinger suggests that inheritance might be due to an “aperiodic crystal”, kicking off the research program that led to the discovery of DNA. I am sure you all have your own favourite ideas. Now, these are not intended to be the best discoveries in science, but the ideas that caused research to get going in particular areas. Have at them… History Philosophy Science
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One of the things that always impresses me is a broad idea than I’ll call “information sciences”: basically the idea that information can be handled in a rigorous manner (e.g. Algorithms, simulations, and probabilistic statistics). This complements many of the items on your list. Another is the uniformity of natural laws throughout time, which nicely complements your item #5.
Its funny. As I was looking at 5 in relation to 3 As the as above so below to some degree could describe the way I look at folklore. While the creatures I look at are fictive and diffrences in naming schemes between elite and peasant society may be the case of social competition masking shared origin. Diffrences do emerge in the narrative. The classificatory systems used seem to be diffrent. Which may make other diffrences down the line. Some medevial commentators seem to ignore social naming diffrences grouping creatures as one. I have wondered, if this suggests that while the object of study is not empirical and are the subject of folklore, the methods used in the classification and discussion of folklore by elite groups may have some basis in sound method. At least in a couple of cases Ive looked at. But Ive not extended things further, It’s a perspective that medevial peasant would not use. It may actual lead to narrative being re-ordered by both groups for diffrent reasons. It’s one of the reasons I like to look longer term than simply looking from the late 17th century onward when the subject does really slowly make the transition to an empirical base.
it takes a professional to make a list like that without Einstein on it. Which is a good thing, in my humble opinion.
I don’t know about best ideas in science, but the one I find most awe-inspiring (and oddly comforting) is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And that’s coming from a total Darwin groupie.
I don’t agree that it is right to leave out Einstein and the interconvertibility of matter and energy. And where would we be without Indian and Arabic mathematics (the zero, algebra etc.)?
I have to disagree with the previous comment re. the maths. I don’t think mathematical tools should be classified as scientific ideas. I tend to think of mathematics as a useful game, rather than a science. It’s a falsifiability thing.
That’s true, to a point. However, particularly in physics, there really isn’t one without the other. The issue is really whether your math can be justified as attempting to model or explain a real phenomena. One of my chief beefs with string theorists is how they tend to blur that line, asserting without evidence that their mathematical model in fact models the actual universe.
Perhaps maths belongs to a separate list as well as this one? As the development in memory technology i.e literacy. The contibution of philosophy and mathmatics that allowed for effective communication. The development of the printing press. What is a science without such things? Foo Foo?
7a. Newton’s First Law of Motion breaks with Aristotle’s metaphysical belief that the heavens are different from the earth.
You have to include Maxwell and Boltzmann and statistical mechanics/thermodynamics! I guess my criterion for such a list wouldn’t be just useful ideas, but counter-intuitive ideas that changed the way people thought about the world. The Milesian school fits perfectly, but Darwin’s discovery wasn’t just common descent, but that difficult revelation that order was a contingent property of history, not the result of a divine plan. People still haven’t absorbed that one, and tend to freak out at even a glimmering of it.