Paradigm Shifts: So that’s it, then?
Over the last two sessions, members of the Year 9 Athenaeum have been considering how some theories which had been accepted for a long time became challenged and how in other cases, theories emerged where there had been none at all before.
The initial examples were drawn for the world of Geology. The students looked at one of the giants of 19th century geology Sir Roderick Murchison. He dominated the Royal Geographical Society and supported the view that when looking at a layer of exposed rocks, the youngest rocks would be found at the top. This view was challenged in a specific case in the Highlands of Scotland where Charles Lapworth and others showed that a particular layer of rocks were not in their original place but had been caused by a gigantic system of dislocations, whereby successive masses of the oldest rocks, had been exhumed from below and thrust over the younger formations.
The students were amazed to then discover that up until the 1960s there was no coherent theory of “Plate tectonics” just various speculations about what forces may be at work. Then the new idea arrived in what philosophers of science like to call a “Paradigm Shift.”
Then, following a shift of a different sort, the students began to look at art.
They began by looking at a painting by Thomas Gainsborough “Mr and Mrs Andrews” around 1750 and considering what criteria might have been used, both at the time it was painted and now to try and evaluate it. The suggestions focussed on composition, technique colour and perhaps most significantly for this exercise, realism. They then looked at Impression, Sunrise 1872 by Claude Monet a painting credited with inspiring the name of the Impressionist movement. Here the students felt that light and colour were very important but deemed it not as realistic. They also referred to the sense created by the painting. Moving on to “The Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh 1889 and part of the post-impressionist movement, the overriding sense of the students was of the power of the colours deployed. Realism as thought of with Gainsborough seemed to them to have little relevance. The students were shocked by the next work “Brown, Red, Black” by Mark Rothko 1959, which seemed stripped of everything but colour, but one or two began to talk about the feelings of the person looking at the painting and that of course was the key point. The “meaning” of this work and in the works by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin which we finished off examining, seems to be increasingly found in the response of the person looking at the work. This suggests that there is no one fixed meaning and moreover that the work can in some sense live on in the experiences of all who view it. This idea, that the viewer or observer is crucial is of course well known in the world of Physics in something called the “Measurement Problem” thus making a nice link to our final topic.
Moving into the world of Physics the students then learnt about how the laws of Newton which govern the world of larger objects seem not to apply in the world of the very small, the world of the quantum particle. The lesson ended with a short video of how quantum computers operate and how different they are from a normal computer. The presenter explained that a quantum computer is not just a more powerful version of a traditional computer, in the same way that a light bulb is not just a more powerful version of a candle, it operates in a fundamentally different way.
As a final exercise the students were asked to identify what they regarded as the key features of a paradigm shift: “A revolution in the field” “Wide impact” “Key individuals” “fundamental shift in thinking” “original theory completely overturned” “shifts many peoples perspectives”
They certainly had the spirit of it all.
All these discussions help the students to see that in their lifetime new theories will continue to emerge in many areas of life and that some things taken as the “truth” now are likely to be subjected to major review as further paradigm shifts occur.
