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Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science Hakob Barseghyan, Nicholas Overgaard, and Gregory Rupik Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science by Hakob Barseghyan, Nicholas Overgaard, and Gregory Rupik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Contents Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science vii Table Of Contents ix 1. Introduction -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 1 2. Absolute Knowledge -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 11 3. Scientific Method -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 31 4. The Laws of Scientific Change -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 49 5. Scientific Progress -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 69 6. Science and Non-Science -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 87 7. Aristotelian-Medieval Worldview -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 99 8. Cartesian Worldview -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 119 9. Newtonian Worldview -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 135 10. Contemporary Worldview -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 151 11. Worldviews: Metaphysical Components -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 171 Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science Hakob Barseghyan, Nicholas Overgaard, and Gregory Rupik Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science by Hakob Barseghyan, Nicholas Overgaard, and Gregory Rupik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. This book was produced using Pressbooks.com. vii Table Of Contents Contents • Part I. Chapter 1: Introduction • Part II. Chapter 2: Absolute Knowledge • Part III. Chapter 3: Scientific Method • Part IV. Chapter 4: The Laws of Scientific Change • Part V. Chapter 5: Scientific Progress • Part VI. Chapter 6: Science and Non-Science • Part VII. Chapter 7: Aristotelian-Medieval Worldview • Part VIII. Chapter 8: Cartesian Worldview • Part IX. Chapter 9: Newtonian Worldview • Part X. Chapter 10: Contemporary Worldview • Part XI. Chapter 11: Worldviews: Metaphysical Components ix 1. Introduction -- Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Imagine that you are not reading this textbook. Imagine instead that you are lying on your back in some soft grass on a warm summer night, far from city lights, staring into the vast, dark night sky. As you continue to gaze at the stars, you would likely notice that over the course of hours they all slowly move – in unison – in the same direction. From the Northern Hemisphere, you will always see the constellation Canis Major near Orion, or the constellation of the Celestial Bear flanked by its seven hunters, but all of them will seem to rotate around Polaris, the North Star. If you are incredibly perceptive, however, you may notice that not all points of light in the night sky move together. Some of them follow their own path, wandering through the sky with the stars as a backdrop. The ancient Greeks called them asteres planetai, meaning wandering stars, which is where we get the word planet from. If you were to carefully track the path of a planet over the course of a few nights, you would realize that – even though its movement is different from that of the stars – it is far from random. It follows a certain path through the night sky. Indeed, while different planets follow different paths, you could begin to notice similarities between the motions of all the planets as they wander through the heavens. Observed from the Earth, they all appear to move in an eastward direction, and their paths are roughly on the same plane. But why? What kind of explanation could we give for why planets’ paths differ from those of the stars? Why do planets seem to behave in very similar ways to one another? What are the best scientific theories we have to explain planetary motion? Let’s try a familiar explanation. Those planets are actually no different from the Earth: they are large massive objects, all orbiting around a much more massive object in the centre of our solar system – the Sun. Isaac Newton showed in his law of universal gravitation that the very same force which pulls an apple to the ground, and which causes the parabolic paths of projectiles, also causes planets and moons to take the precise paths they do through space. The speed of the planets and the force of gravity keep planets like the Earth and Mars in orbit around the Sun. From the vantage point of Earth, therefore, planets seem to wander through the night sky because they are following their own, elliptical paths around our nearby Sun. Meanwhile, the constellations and positions of the stars remain relatively fixed because they are so far away from the solar system, and they rotate together due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis. This is the answer you would receive if you were able to travel back to the year 1800 and ask a member of the scientific community at the Royal Society in London, England to give you their best, agreed-upon scientific theories about planetary motion. But what if we were to travel even further back in time, say 500 years? What accepted theories would an astronomer from the University of Paris in the year 1500 use to explain the wandering of the planets? A late-medieval astronomer would explain planetary motion by referencing Aristotelian natural philosophy. This set of theories accounted for the motion of objects by considering the movements that are natural to different elements. It was believed at the time that the universe is made of two completely distinct regions – terrestrial and celestial. Everything in the terrestrial region was thought to be composed of a certain combination of the four terrestrial elements – earth, water, air, and fire. The elements earth and water were believed to be heavy, while the elements air and fire were believed to be light. 3 4 Hakob Barseghyan, Nicholas Overgaard, and Gregory Rupik Each of the four elements was thought to have a natural position to which it is predisposed. For heavy elements, the natural position is the centre of the universe, which explained why everything made of elements earth and water has a tendency to fall down. This is why, they would say, when you drop a rock it goes straight down. This would also suggest that the terrestrial globe, which is predominantly a combination of the elements earth and water, should necessarily be at the centre of the universe. In the celestial region, in contrast, everything, including the planets and the stars, was believed to be made of a completely different element, aether. The natural tendency of aether is to revolve in a circular path around the centre of the universe. The planets, being between the stationary sphere of the Earth and the slowly-rotating stars, naturally follow their own circular paths through the night sky, accounting for their apparent “wandering” in front of the distant stars. Tired of all this hypothetical time travel, let’s say you made an actual voyage to the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, USA, and – after a relaxing day at the beach – asked a modern-day astronomer to explain planetary motion using the best, agreed-upon scientific theories. The astronomer would not give you the Aristotelian-Medieval answer, nor would they give you the Newtonian answer you may be familiar with from basic physics or astronomy classes. The accepted view today is that the paths of the planets, like the Earth, are best explained by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, not Newton’s law of universal gravitation. Today, the elliptical paths of planets around the sun are not taken to be due to a force called gravity but are rather due to the fact that the mass of our Sun bends the fabric of space-time itself. Imagine a region of space-time without any material objects. Such a region would be completely flat. What this means is that in such a space, light rays would travel along straight lines, and the geometry we learned in secondary school, Euclidean geometry, will hold exactly. Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science 5 Now, let’s add a star to this region of space. According to general relativity, this star will curve the space-time around it, affecting the motion of all other material processes in its vicinity, including light rays. The space will no longer be exactly describable by Euclid’s geometry, but rather by a geometry developed by the German mathematician Herman Minkowski and incorporated by Einstein into his theory. This geometry treats time as a fourth dimension, perpendicular to the familiar three dimensions of length, width, and breadth, which is why we speak of space-time. Even physicists can’t really picture all this. They can represent the situation using mathematical equations and make predictions by solving them. They understand these mathematical models by using analogies that involve fewer dimensions. As an example of such an analogy, let’s imagine a stretched bedsheet with a basketball placed in the middle of it. The basketball will make a dip in the bedsheet. The two-dimensional bedsheet represents four-dimensional space-time. The dip in the bedsheet in the third dimension produced by the ball represents the curvature of four- dimensional space-time produced by an object with mass, like a star. Now, let’s roll a tennis ball across the bedsheet. Because the fabric of the bedsheet is curved by the basketball, the tennis ball will not move in a straight line, but rather will have a curved trajectory along the bedsheet. It will appear as though the tennis ball is attracted by the basketball, while in fact it is merely following the curvature of the bedsheet.
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