Aguilar, Princess Nicole F.

CAS-06-101P

1. Copernican Revolution
 This view of the universe, cumbersome as it was, survived, virtually unchallenged, for thirteen
hundred years, until the early sixteenth century when the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus
Copernicus, put forward a radically different model. The reason the stars appeared to orbit the
earth was, he suggested, because the earth itself was moving, rotating on its own axis once
every twenty-four hours. The apparent movement of the heavens was an illusion, caused by the
movement of the observer.
Suggesting that the earth moved was heresy enough. But Copernicus went on to argue that the
wandering motion of the planets could be explained if they were orbiting the sun rather than the earth.
This led to the theory that the earth was itself just another planet also in orbit around the sun. (This was
not a totally new theory. A little know Greek philosopher, Aristarchus, had advanced the idea that the
earth and the other planets moved around the sun in 270 BC. If his views, rather than those of Plato and
Ptolemy, had held sway, history might have taken a very different course.) Being a distinguished
churchman, Copernicus knew the views of the Vatican on the earth's all important position at the center
of the universe, and how tenaciously it held to that view. In proposing his theory, he was not just
challenging orthodox science; he was challenging the established religious view of reality -- which in
those days held even greater sway than the scientific view. So, fearing the wrath of the church, he kept
his ideas to himself for thirty years. Only as he was nearing death, and feeling that he did not want to
take this important knowledge with him to the grave, did he finally decide to publish his little book On
the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. When it was eventually published, in 1543, (Copernicus first
saw a copy on the day he died) it was immediately placed on the papal index of forbidden books. So it
remained, ignored and forgotten, for nearly eighty years, until the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei took up
an interest in planetary motions. Utilizing the newly invented telescope, he found convincing evidence in
favor of the Copernican model. He saw that Venus had phases, just like the moon, when only half, or just
a crescent, of it would be lit -- which is what would happen if Venus orbited the sun. He also found that
Jupiter had its own moons in orbit around it, dispelling the idea that everything went around the earth.
After publishing his findings, Galileo was contacted by Pope Paul V, who demanded he retract his
heretical ideas. Fearing for his life, he did so. But a few years later, unhappy that so important a truth
should remain suppressed, he published a brilliantly composed dialogue in which he defended and
supported the Copernican theory. Again, under threat of torture, he was forced to "abjure, curse, and
detest" the absurd view that the earth moves around the sun. He was then put under house-arrest so
that he could be watched and prevented from causing any further trouble -- and remained there till his
death. At the same time as Galileo was making his critical observations of the planets, a German
mathematician, Johannes Kepler, was putting into place another key piece of the puzzle. Copernicus had
argued that the sun, not the earth, lay at the center of things, but he still adhered to the Platonic ideal of
circular motion, and although his model explained planetary movements much better than the old
geocentric model, there were still unexplained irregularities, which Copernicus tried to account for with
various epicycles. Kepler had the good fortune to be a student of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe,
who had accumulated volumes of accurate astronomical observations. Brahe set Kepler to work on the
motion of Mars, the planet with the most troublesome orbit. Kepler’s breakthrough was the discovery
that the movements of Mars, and all the other planets, could be accounted for, without any need for
epicycles, if their orbits were ellipses rather than circles. But as to why the orbits should be circles rather
than ellipses, he had no idea. The final piece of the puzzle was put in place some 50 years later by the
English mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton. He realized that heavenly bodies were governed by exactly the
same laws as earthly objects; the force that causes an apple to fall is the same force that holds the moon
in its orbit around the earth. Working out the resulting equations of motion he established that any
orbiting body would indeed move in an ellipse -- just as Kepler had discovered.

The revolution was now complete. The journey had been started by Copernicus, but putting it all
together had involved other equally significant breakthroughs in thinking, and had taken nearly 150
years to complete. (Although it was not until 1992 that the Vatican finally admitted Galileo been right.)

2. Related Branches of STS

 Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a relatively new academic field. Its roots lie in the
interwar period and continue into the start of the Cold War, when historians and sociologists of
science, and scientists themselves, became interested in the relationship between scientific
knowledge, technological systems, and society. The best known product of this interest was
Thomas Kuhn’s classic 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This influential work
helped crystallize a new approach to historical and social studies of science, in which scientific
facts were seen as products of scientists’ socially conditioned investigations rather than as
objective representations of nature. Among the many ramifications of Kuhn’s work was a
systematic effort by social scientists to probe how scientific discovery and its technological
applications link up with other social developments, in law, politics, public policy, ethics, and
culture.
STS, as practiced in academia today, merges two broad streams of scholarship. The first consists of
research on the nature and practices of science and technology (S&T). Studies in this genre approach
S&T as social institutions possessing distinctive structures, commitments, practices, and discourses that
vary across cultures and change over time. This line of work addresses questions like the following: is
there a scientific method; what makes scientific facts credible; how do new disciplines emerge; and how
does science relate to religion? The second stream concerns itself more with the impacts and control of
science and technology, with particular focus on the risks, benefits and opportunities that S&T may pose
to peace, security, community, democracy, environmental sustainability, and human values. Driving this
body of research are questions like the following: how should states set priorities for research funding;
who should participate, and how, in technological decisionmaking; should life forms be patented; how
should societies measure risks and set safety standards; and how should experts communicate the
reasons for their judgments to the public? The rise of STS as a teaching field reflects a dawning
recognition that specialization in today’s research universities does not fully prepare future citizens to
respond knowledgeably and reflectively to the most important challenges of the contemporary world.
Increasingly, the dilemmas that confront people, whether in government, industry, politics or daily life,
cut across the conventional lines of academic training and thought. STS seeks to overcome the divisions,
particularly between the two cultures of humanities (interpretive inquiry) and natural sciences (rational
analysis). STS teaching seeks to promote cross-disciplinary integration, civic engagement, and critical
thinking. Undergraduate STS courses are especially popular with engineering and pre-professional
students, including premeds. They help to illuminate issues of professional responsibility and ethics.
Such courses also build bridges between disciplines that do not ordinarily meet each other in the
undergraduate curriculum, such as sociology and science, law and science, anthropology and technology,
environmental science and political theory, or technology and philosophy. Graduate STS courses offer
ways of integrating knowledge in areas that are impossible to grasp through any single discipline;
examples include security studies, environmental studies, globalization, the human sciences, and biology
and society. STS courses in these areas enable students to form more robust understandings of the
nature of controversy, the causes of scientific and technological change, the relationship of culture and
reason, and the limits of rational analytic methods in characterizing complex problems. In sum, STS
explores in rich and compelling ways what difference it makes to human societies that we, collectively,
are producers and users of science and technology. STS research, teaching, and outreach offer citizens of
modern, high-tech societies the resources with which to evaluate—analytically, esthetically, and ethically
—the benefits and the risks, the perils and the promises, of notable advances in science and technology.

3. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution

 In "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas Kuhn presents a revolutionary approach to
how science functions and progresses. Against the normal perception of science as a linear
accumulation of knowledge, Kuhn attempts to view science as progressing in leaps from one
"paradigm" to the next.
Kuhn is revolutionary in the philosophy of science since he views scientific practice a something
conducted by a community rather than a set of individuals. As a community the science world is
sociological matter, especially in terms of having norms and common held beliefs which function within
it and regulate it. Kuhn argues for example that scientific education is in fact the socialization or
indoctrination of the young researcher into the conventional manner in which science is practiced. This is
what Kuhn famously calls "paradigm", the unspoken basic assumption which make the world view of a
scientific community and allows it to function. In "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Kuhn describes
the history of science as a progression from one paradigm to the next. When a certain paradigm is
enough to account for the world as it is perceived, "normal science" can function, elaborating knowledge
within the paradigm. But when a paradigm enters a crisis, like in meeting phenomenon it cannot account
for of arriving at internal contradictions, the search for a new paradigm is on. What happens eventually
according to Kuhn is that the paradigmatic crisis leads to a scientific revolutions which marks a shift, even
rupture, from the preexisting paradigm. This means that all prior knowledge has to be reintegrated into
the concepts and structures of the new paradigm. When this is complete science can once again function
as "normal science" until the next paradigm crisis and scientific revolution. Changing paradigms is similar
to a religious conversion, which also draws heavy contention from conservative powers. Kuhn's "The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is considered to mark the postmodern turn in the philosophy of
science, making human knowledge a relative field of belief as much as it is of objective knowledge.

4. Paradigm Shifts in the Scientific Revolution

  Thomas Kuhn popularized the concept of "paradigm" in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. Among other things, Kuhn argued that paradigms are like over-arching theories that
guide specific areas of science. A paradigm is essentially a particular view of the world.
Paradigms emerge to provide an overall framework for understanding particular phenomena.
The paradigm gains acceptance if the community of interested scientists agrees that it fits with
most of the observable data.
Paradigms Are One Category of "Ideas"
Ideas and concepts (such as danger, big, anxiety, IQ) are mental images and not objects – they are not
things observable in the real world. Theories and paradigms join several concepts together and attempt
to approximate what is observable in the physical world. In that sense, all concepts, though they may be
very useful (such as mathematics, philosophy, or triangle), are “fictions.” That is, they do not exist in the
real world. One can find objects shaped like triangles in the physical world, but one cannot find
“triangle” in the physical world. In this view, paradigms, scientific theories, philosophies, and
mathematics can never be “true.” Why? Because they are simply models - approximations constructed in
the world of ideas that provide a useful way to interpret the physical world. We consider them useful
because they lead to useful applications or useful ways to structure knowledge. Those that do not prove
to be useful (the flat Earth view of the world, bloodletting as a cure for disease) are eventually discarded
by all but a few.

Paradigms in Science
Paradigms provide models upon which "particular coherent traditions of scientific research" can be
based. For example, the scientific method itself is a paradigm (though which "science" views the world: a
traditional Western, empirical, quantitative approach to studying things). Another example of a
paradigm is the theory of evolution. Evolution is the underlying structure which best fits the observable
evidence in fields as diverse as biology (the evolution of species), geology (the evolution of the earth),
and cosmology (the evolution of the stars, the galaxies, and the universe). A third example is Newtonian
mechanics. This was the basic paradigm for physics until Einstein came a long and demonstrated that
relativity was a better fit to the available facts – a better approximation to the real world. It’s not that
mechanics was “false” and relativity “true.” Newtonian mechanics fit most of the available data found in
the everyday existence of human beings, but broke down at extremes of mass and speed. But as a
model, it was – and is – still very useful when dealing with the engineering, construction, and use of the
technology and artifacts that people use in everyday life. Newtonian mechanics has been replaced as the
dominant paradigm in physics, but it is not “false,” because it never was “true.” It is simply a model of
how things work, and is either useful for one’s purpose or it is not useful. Like theories, paradigms are
"useful fictions." Like theories, they provide a framework upon which we can hang many or most of the
observable facts (data) and better see the relationships among those facts. Paradigms are often theories
that help define entire areas of study ("disciplines"). But the notion of paradigms that shape our world-
view has been expanded beyond science to everyday life. Kuhn’s original focus was on the creation,
testing, and replacement of major scientific theories with better theories – closer approximations to the
observable data. Today, the term has been popularized to refer to things as simple as beliefs, attitudes
and tastes. In this sense, a paradigm is analogous to a set of glasses one puts on. If the lenses are yellow,
we see the world as yellow. After a while, we forget we have decided to look at the world through yellow
lenses – we simply believe that the world is yellow. In the discussion that follows I will refer sometimes
to the scientific meaning of paradigms (major world-views of science) and sometimes to the popular one
(a particular approach to a particular issue).

Paradigms as Lenses
Once a paradigm (or model) is established or accepted, an interesting thing happens – it shapes how we
interpret facts. Take someone who believes in a paradigm that holds that many UFO sightings are extra-
terrestrial beings visiting the planet Earth. How do they interpret new evidence? An exhaustive
government study of existing evidence and a report dismissing the extraterrestrial claims would probably
be taken as more evidence for a cover-up. Ambiguous evidence is often be interpreted as favoring the
theory. Or listen to a talk show where the host is politically quite liberal or quite conservative. Virtually
every event that occurs in the world is interpreted through a liberal or conservative lens. Typically new
data points (facts) that appear to contradict the host’s paradigm are twisted to fit the existing (preferred)
model. If you’re conservative you can see this in liberal thinking, and if you’re liberal you can see this in
conservative thinking. But it’s hard to take off our own lenses and see the world “as it really is.” I put that
in quotes because as soon as we enter the world of language and ideas and human communication, we
must take on some paradigm, some perspective. And whether we're looking at a house, a mountain, or
an issue, the perspective we take frames what we see. Since all knowledge is created in human minds,
and from some specific perspective, postmodernists argue that no one can legitimately claim to see the
world as it really is. We each have our own eyes and ears, and our own mind and history of previous
experiences - and so the world occurs differently to each of us. This is where the scientific method comes
in – it is designed to keep researchers from injecting their personal views into their data collection, data
analysis, and conclusions. Researchers (are supposed to) rely on the scientific method to minimize bias
and mistakes. While the scientific method provides a rigorous structure to keep scientists from their own
biases, since they are human beings they are subject to the tendency to make sense of the world, find
patterns, and emerge with a structure of beliefs that holds together. But Kuhn argued that the scientist’s
paradigm itself becomes a trap. He argued that scientists do a reasonable job of assessing data when
considering alternative paradigms and theories. But once a scientist takes on a particular paradigm or
theory, they see data that supports this view quite well, but they overlook contradicting data quite easily.

“Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can
always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the
early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternates. But
that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm
stage of their science's development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution. So
long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines,
science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The
reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science - retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the
occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for
retooling has arrived.” - Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (p. 76)

Paradigm Shifts
A paradigm shift occurs when there is a “crisis” in a particular field. The crisis is always related to the fact
that the old paradigm can no longer account for enough of the existing evidence to be believed by a
majority of people. At the same time, there is typically strong enough evidence to indicate that a
relatively new paradigm is a better structure through which to view the available evidence. At first, such
new approaches are often rejected, even ridiculed. Copernicus and Galileo both had better paradigms,
but they both suffered for leading the scientific revolution – for being too far ahead of their times. It
takes time, but eventually the old view is replaced by the new view, because it is a better approximation
to reality (it fits better with the available evidence). For example, Newtonian mechanics was the primary
paradigm in physics until the 20th Century when Einstein's theory of relativity was demonstrated to be a
better approximation of the physics of the universe.
likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can
replace them." - Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Paradigms in Society, Business,
and Our Personal Lives. The term "paradigm" has been popularized in the last 20 years and some very
minor trends, such as changes in consumer preferences for music, clothes, or soda, have been touted as
paradigm shifts. Rather than be a purist and refuse to recognize that the language of paradigms has been
co-opted by business and industry for smaller trends, let’s go with the flow. And it is possible to find
examples within business, government, or education of changes so profound that, at least within those
particular fields, they merit the title of a "paradigm shift."