5 - Dissent in the Sciences

Summary

Like religion, science has been prone to dogmatism historically, with bitter disputes taking place when established theories were challenged by dissenting voices. Since in most cases those theories had formed the basis of traditional knowledge about the world for centuries, it was no small matter to claim that they might be wrong. This is the landscape that Thomas S. Kuhn's work in the philosophy and history of science was concerned with, where scientific ‘paradigms’, as he dubbed them, have defined how the subject was to be viewed and taught, as well as what it was and was not acceptable to call into question about its theories and methods. Every great change in physics, for example, has led to heated exchanges between defenders of the existing paradigm and those propounding a new theory, which generally has involved adopting a radically different worldview incompatible with the old –the difference, as was the case with the clash of Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy, between the Sun orbiting the Earth or the Earth the Sun. Whichever one you believed in, you had to reject the claims of the other, the difference was that stark. Eventually the Copernican system became the accepted paradigm, registering a clear victory for dissent in the process. But scientific enquiry has continued to identify contradictions and anomalies in even the best-established theories over the years, leading to a regular series of disputes between the profession's gatekeepers, who rarely give up without a fight, and those espousing newly incompatible theories and concepts –paradigm wars, as it were, which more often than not become clashes between the older and younger generation of scientists. Once the older generation has gone, the entire process starts all over again with an emerging new one. (Kuhn's conception of scientific history has been criticised as being rather too neat, but in broad general terms it still provides a useful overview of how the scientific community reacts to new theories.)

So sweeping have the changes proved to be in modern physics, however, that science as a whole has become less dogmatically inclined than heretofore, although it can still happen, as revealed by all the controversy over the search for a grand unified theory reconciling Einsteinian physics with quantum mechanics.