History And Philosophy Of Science Essays - Albert Einstein

History And Philosophy Of Science The world of science, as we know it today, is a difficult subject to grasp. So many new ideas are present and these new ideas are not interchangeable. Some parts do work together although as a whole they don't fully coincide with each other. The three basic ideas that science is now based upon come from Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. I call these ideas/theories ?new? based on what I classify the state of the scientific community of today. After looking at what is going on in science, it is clear to me that the scientific world is in a crisis state. According to Kuhn, a crisis state is when science is in the middle of choosing a particular paradigm to work under. For scientists, there is a general theme or way of thinking which constitutes how they conduct their work and how they analyze their results. Kuhn goes to great measures to classify this scenario as paradigm. In chapter two of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn states ?(paradigms)...provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research,? (p.10). If this is what scientists agree upon as paradigm then it is obvious that science is in a crisis state. At the present time, scientific explanations vary depending on what part of science is being explored. Until there is an idea/theory that explains science as a whole, science will be in a crisis state. In order for scientists to successfully remove themselves from this crisis state they need to understand how science arrived to this point and why it has stayed there for the past century. In the seventeenth century a scientists known as Newton came forward with his Principia Mathematica. In Shlain's Art and Physics he states that, ?He made sweeping discoveries about gravity, motion, and light.? This Principia explained every part of science that was known to man. (Keep in mind that ?Science that is known to man,? is a very important piece to my theory.) In the time of Newton, the three laws of motion were sufficient for explaining how and why the world works as it does. Newton's theory consisted of the three laws of motion. The first one, every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion, unless it's compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. The second law states that the change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed, and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. The third law simply pulls the two together by stating that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton had given the world what we now know as physics. For the past three hundred years Newtonian Mechanics have been taught to every student aspiring to elevate their minds. Newtonian Mechanics were the end all to the questions that had plagued thinkers since the beginning of time. The key difference is that Newton was never exposed to the world of science that technology had made prevalent to the likes of an Einstein or Hawking, or even my colleague studying neuro surgery at John's Hopkins University. When Newton was sitting under his apple tree conjuring up ideas for how and why he did not fly off into space or why the harder you hit something the farther it goes, technology was moving along at the rate of most people's grandmothers in their walkers. The scientists that had surrounded Newton knew only of what they could see. Their were no people looking to the far ends of the galaxies and their were no people looking in to the unseen cells that make up everything that we can see. Basic ally, Newton did not have a reason to explain what he was not aware of. He did have quite good reason, however, to explain why he got a bump on his head from that ripe apple that no longer needed the shelter of the tree. According to Shlain, Newton set the world he knew to mechanics and set the parameters for the new and final, well what was thought to be the final paradigm of the world. Then in 1905,