coyotezee said:
This thread is too long to read every post, so I'm just responding to the main question of the thread. Forgive me if I rehash what others have already said.
Much as been made lately of deconstructionism, which, as I understand it, argues that even science is not objective but somehow comes up with the answers it was predisposed to find. While science has always had to be on guard against striving to confirm what it already knows, rather than finding a new idea that better explains it, science has generally made progress toward a global understanding of the physical universe. As such, paradigm shifts should be fewer and farther between.
Note the big paradigm shifts to date: The start of modern science, with heleocentrism and the use of the scientific method. For a while, there were dramatic new discoveries that changed much of what we thought we knew, in area of physics (electricity and magnitism), geology (identifying how various rocks formed over time), biology (evolution), medicine (germ theory), and so on. A hundred years ago we had the dramatic shift in physics to relativity and quantum mechanics, but these did not so much change what we already knew as give it a new context. In astronomy, the discovery of galaxies and then the Big Bang. Plate techtonics transformed geology, but again, it did not so much invalidate what we knew but gave it a more complete basis.
Today, there are fewer and few things that are so poorly understood that there will be dramatic new discoveries, except at the fringes: astrophysics, high-energy particle theories, etc. Remember that to replace the existing paradigm, a new one will have to at least explain everything we already know plus some things we can't explain.
There is, of course, much we have to learn, but the gaps are always decreasing; that is the nature of science. Someone mentioned that fifty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age and now they are predicting warming. But that is not a paradigm shift so much as just getting better at understanding a complex thing like atmosphere and having better data to go on. People who are holding out for someone to conclusively contradict the global warming expectations are naive.
I have a great deal of trust (I would not call it faith) in science to help us understand our place in the cosmos. Better theories will give us a better idea of that place, but that is no reason to question the value of what we already have.
That was a really excellent analysis, thanks, I enjoyed reading it.
I've noted with interest a range of sentiments about the future of fundamental physics. Some particle physicists working on the LHC have suggested that the state of physics today is comparable to how it was at the dawn of the 20th century: almost everything fits very well into our theoretical framework, but there are a few glaring problems, such as the issues of dark energy, dark matter, and the unification of gravity and the other fundamental forces. Thus, according to them, physics is fundamentally broken.
"Fundamentally broken" refers to the conceptual, not practical sense. Practically, we know we are very,very,very close to the truth because we've measured it experimentally to great precision. The same was true at the beginning of the 20th century. And when people like Einstein and Schrodinger introduced profound conceptual changes, all the previous physics (Newtonian gravity, Maxwell's electromagnetism) was still correct for all practical purposes. But they did introduce tiny corrections which at first had no practical significance, but today are indispensable for high-tech gear from GPS positioning to iPods.
On the other hand, these same particle physicists have been searching for something beyond the Standard Model for 40 years. They are in desperate need of funding and manual (grad student) labor. So it's in their self-interest to talk up the potential for a revolution in fundamental physics.
Meanwhile, many outside particle physicists are skeptical that we will see major paradigm shifts in fundamental physics any time soon. The reason is that the cost, in dollars, manpower and brainpower, rises exponentially when we do experiments that test physics more fundamentally, and the risk of discovering nothing (or of the funding running out) outweighs the enormous cost. Earth-shattering discoveries were made by people like Rutherford with little more than a grad student and a few hours' time. Now, something like the LHC requires international collaboration of thousands of engineers, scientists, technicians, and politicians, and $billions that could be used to do cancer or AIDS research.
I do understand that we continue to see enormous progress, and paradigm shifts, in biological fields. The world of biology is astonishingly complicated and diverse....and it has only begun to use advanced tools from physics and get really quantitative, especially at the molecular level.
Storm said:
The first thing that springs to mind is when people try to use science to justify their theology (or lack thereof). That's what got me pondering the question, anyway.
If the theology is posited in such a way as to be testable, then it is reasonable to examine it scientifically. There is a reason many people in the early 19th century believed God purposefully directed lightning bolts, while few people believe that today, and it has nothing to do with breakthroughs in theology.
