His rigorous and meticulous approach was faultless, and he was a good empirical scientist. His measurements were supremely accurate and were used for measuring the motion of the planets until the time of Copernicus. Using the equipment he had available, with no telescopes and limited mathematics, there was little wrong with Ptolemy’s theories or methods. Poor Ptolemy is often used as a metaphor for bad science and irrationality, but this is unfair, and a fallacious argument from superiority. It was onto this foundation that Newtonian physics was built. The paradigm shifted, and it was only the resistance of the church that prevented immediate adoption. With Galileo, and the invention of the telescope, the model fell more neatly into place, and the first fairly accurate model of the universe emerged. However, his mathematics and theory was cleaner, and supported by Occam’s razor. Copernicus did not completely find the answer, because his model still required epicycles, and he had no inkling that orbits were elliptical, and not the perfect circles that convention dictated. This is an example of how fringe science slowly builds evidence against an established paradigm. It was not until Copernicus that this view was directly challenged. Copernicus postulated that the sun was at the center of the solar system (heliocentrism), which was regarded as the center of the universe at that time. More epicycles had to be added, making circles within circles. The problem with that view came when Ptolemy, and later observers, made more accurate observations. Ptolemy's response fits Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm dictating the very nature of the reasoning within it, before the inevitable paradigm shift. Ptolemy explained the anomalies by saying that the planets moved in epicycles, or circles within greater circles. Some planets, when their positions were measured, appeared to move backwards relative to others, a retrograde motion. Unfortunately, the empirical observations did not entirely fit this view.
Ptolemy, in common with most Ancient Greek philosophers, believed that the earth was at the center of the universe (geocentrism), and that the sun and other planets revolved around it. Roman mathematician and astrologer Claudius Ptolemy’s fixation on the paradigm of his time created problems. “revolutionary science.” While normal science entails gathering more data, revolutionary science entails looking at the same data but in a completely different way. However, eventually the basic and fundamental principles may be shown to be inadequate and there is a paradigm shift, i.e. A certain amount of error is accepted, and it can be absorbed by slight changes in the paradigm. “Normal science” continues for a long time, until some experiments begin uncovering inconsistencies. Early chaos theorists had difficulty securing funding, finding supervisors, or getting journals to publish their research. When these anomalies can no longer be ignored, the shift can be quick and total.įor example, Feigenbaum's explorations of chaos theory took a long time to take root, and his ideas were originally marginalized, because they lay outside the established classical paradigm of physics. Kuhn believed that paradigm shifts are instigated by accumulated evidence within a paradigm – “anomalies” – that are not adequately supported by current theories. The weight of scientific and public resistance to material that challenges a paradigm may mean that fringe ideas are initially ridiculed. But every so often, a scientist has a revelation. In fairness, this is an understandable stance to take.
This debate spilled over into the public discourse, and newspapers became filled with cartoons and caricatures of Darwin and his extraordinary new suggestions.Ī paradigm shift is often the result of scientists working at the fringe of that paradigm, performing research that most other researchers feel is a little misguided, or a dead end. For example, Darwin’s theories were intensely debated by scientists and theologians. A paradigm shift is not limited to academics alone, but its effect ripples out into the public consciousness, too.
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