Scientific revolutions other than the societal paradigm shift to make things cleaner, or sustainability revolution, have paved the way for inventions, which has only enabled time to be focused on efficiency and pollution control (Kuhn). But these other scientific revolutions historically have failed to include the conservation, preservation, and environmentalist efforts needed to prevent the environment from deteriorating. On the other hand, they have often led to great changes in how we live and have improved various disciplines, bettering our standards of life. These earlier scientific "paradigm shifts" have led to destructive pollution due to its anthropocentrism, or our regard for ourselves in the highest esteem (Kuhn). Our anthropocentric leaning wasn't questioned until the sustainability revolution that has said, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't destroy the ecosystem, ruin our atmosphere, and make other species go extinct, because in the end, it will harm us. Like other revolutions where the search has been for the truth, the main driving impetus is the new dilemma of unsustainability.
In my paper, I will mention a few scientific paradigm shifts with relevance to our environment as chronologically as possible and I'll briefly summarize the key concepts I have gathered after reading Kuhn. Given the understanding that scientific revolutions are progressive, and can be concurrent or “shared” by each other, scientific revolutions are peaceful by nature, devoid of politics and social dogma, but are universal in the drive of the scientist to ascertain truth before the dust has settled. Scientific revolutions may have a few phases, enduring a crisis much like political revolutions, and then the removal of a previous paradigm with another one, which is like replacing a political government for another one though almost always for the better in terms of scientific progress. Unlike political entities, science always progresses closer to the truth, because the scientist cannot endure the question, “what if I am wrong?”, though there are always “men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simple read out of the profession” (Kuhn). Since science is based on “rational thought” when a scientist is engaged in a difficult problem, it is essentially esoteric and limited to the scientist in his or her field. The average layman merely feels the bumps and crevices of the revolution as its positivistic outcomes.
It is the invention of a new apparatus that allows scientists to make discoveries or make progress in his or her experiment without the use of thought experiments, like Einstein did. The invention of the thermostat in 1593 by Galileo allowed chemists to make rudimentary measurements before and after chemical reactions. Some reactions at the time had phlogiston because they caught fire (Kuhn). After numbers were placed on the thermometer by an Italian inventor in 1612 was the apparatus’ function fully operational to unequivocally quantify thermal energy. The barometer or device that measures pressure, which was invented in 1643, led to Boyle’s assistant building the apparatus that later enabled Boyle to create the law of gas in 1662. Later, the phlogiston paradigm would be replaced when Laviossior (who was the second person to discover oxygen), making it instead a principle as the law of conversation of mass in 1789.
Pythagoras asserted that the world is round not flat, which was in itself a paradigm shift. Despite it being a mere theory, it was considered paradigm in Greece and later the West since 570 BC. Without this realization, we wouldn’t be here today. Indeed, it has enabled us to travel the world and changed the fates of natives in the North Americas. It also enabled Copernicus to incur a scientific revolution because he was able to invent the heliocentric view of the planets, which deviated from and supplanted the geocentric model. It is worth noting a Greek first thought of the heliocentric paradigm but it gained no momentum as a paradigm (Kuhn). Astronomy, thus, was forever changed and they could apply Newtonian mechanics to the planets, allowing astronomers to produce prolific discoveries (Kuhn).
The laws of planetary motion developed by Kepler in 1609 explained the planetary movements in the heavens, which provided a basic paradigm for the time when Newton developed his theory of universal gravity. Newton’s theory, which was later supplanted by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, allows us to calculate the trajectory of flying objects with mathematics with accuracy. After the confirmation the theory of special relativity, which was developed in 1905, the application of this knowledge led to the construction of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons (that he himself did not approve of). As an indirect result of politics, we ecologically demolished Hiroshima and the Japanese when we dropped the hydrogen bomb, the first primitive, in retrospect, invention of its kind.
In biology, the fact that they were able to prove spontaneous generation does not occur, by Redi in 1668, disproved the theory by Aristotle that explained the appearance of organisms once and for all, and now it was univocal generation. This led for biologists to ask further questions regarding the origin of life and what conditions needed to arise for an organism to spontaneously appear. The theory of evolution by natural selection, by Darwin in 1859, solidified this proof, throwing out preconceptions made about how animals came to exist or religious doctrine. This was a paradigm shift in itself. For sustainability purposes, now people are modifying genes in plants, animals, or doing research in general due to this discovery, environmentally affecting the earth forever.
Scientific paradigm shifts, in their “aftermaths”, have changed the way we interact in our environment as aforementioned, but seem to only go so far that whatever machines or technologies invented as a result assumed we live in a bountiful, all-giving world. The sustainability revolution, on the other hand, which has similar qualities more to the non-social sciences such as chemistry and biology than to say, sociology, raises more problems for the “puzzle-solving” scientist to work on. The sustainability revolution is yet still a scientific paradigm shift in my opinion. It has all the properties of a scientific revolution, because it is peaceful, enters a mode of crisis between and after we shift between the industrial to sustainability paradigms, and there are those in the community who blatantly deny the necessity of the now widely accepted paradigm. There are those who argue it is a social phenomenon, like Edwards in his opening chapter of The Sustainability Revolution: a Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, but in our textbook, sustainability is defined as part of the environmental sciences and is not mere environmentalism at play. The origin of the sustainable revolution comes from ancient wisdoms and religions. For instance, the Native Americans realized that one must give back to the earth and they were closely in tune with their environment.
The sustainability revolution is in the process of implementation in undeveloped nations via three phases, genesis (the initial industrial revolution aspect), crisis mode (like crisis as aforementioned), and diffusion (Edwards). The uniqueness of it as a paradigm is that it seeks to supplant the industrial revolution. Unlike the industrial revolution, which wasn’t the first of its kind before there was the agricultural revolution around 10,000 B.C., the sustainability revolution seeks to solve the crises at hand: increased population, over extraction of resources, over use of soil by agriculture, ozone depletion, habitat destruction, pollution in general, and global climate change to name a few, making it far larger a task and if solved would be a huge feat. The sustainability revolution is a positive force that is due to a simple human understanding: if something is not done about earth’s deteriorating condition, then future generations will pay the price and suffer (Edwards). Unlike the sustainability revolution, prior revolutions have changed our usage, consumption, pollution, and generally the way we act in our environment profoundly. The sustainability revolution is more like an applied pressure on the wound, which has been inflicted on the earth by our anthropocentricism.
Bibliography
Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. Print.
Edwards, Andrés R. The Sustainability Revolution: A portrait of a Paradigm Shift. Gabriela Island: New
Society Publishers, 2005. Print.
Wikipedia. 2011. 12 October 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries>
Enchanted Learning. 2011. 12 October 2011.
<http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/1900b.shtml>
Bellis, Mary. “History of the Thermometer.” About. No editor. No date published. New York Times
Company. 13 October 2011.
<http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/History-Of-The-Thermometer.htm>
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