Following on from the previous post, in science, particularly from the 1600’s onwards, because of improvements in methods of doing experiments, as well as the accuracy of instruments and laboratory equipment, what we can observe and measure began to carry more weight than the belief that what we wish for or how we feel about something influences whatever we are studying or exploring.
However in the early 20th Century developments in quantum mechanics and chaos theory as well as the theory of relativity got scientists thinking again about how the person undertaking an experiment influences the experiment – and in particular how science, far from being fixed and certain, (Newtonian) is actually full of uncertainty.
While these developments might not have changed the world view of the average human that much, they did have some significance in our felt understanding of complexity, as scientific discovery eventually filters through to society at large and affects social and political development.
So, over the past 130 years or so, in parallel to science becoming uncertain – and this is the important bit when it comes to this website – the view that we have of our world has changed (and is still changing) from being a world with firm boundaries where almost everything is provable and undeniable, to a much more complex mish-mash of uncertainty, ambiguity, and even insecurity, where the old certainties of class, religion, status, employment, right and wrong, and even family structure are, all the time, in doubt.
In short – our world has got a lot more complex!
Now some scientists in the 1600’s proposed that reductionism was not the only way of measuring, in particular when it came to living systems, but they were not really taken that seriously as scientific discoveries enabled by reductionist thought raced ahead and the new technology that promised (and delivered) so much became universally available.
Also, the non-mechanistic world view was associated with ancient sciences that depended on intuition, faith, and what we would now call pseudo-sciences such as alchemy, astrology and other semi-religious beliefs. After the Renaissance and the (astounding at that time) discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Newton and others, precision, technology and certainty were in, intuition, shamanism and uncertainty were out.
For example, we increasingly began to believe that whether or not rain fell from the sky and assisted our crops to grow depended on temperature, air pressure, altitude, wind-speed etc. and not on our ability to dance or pray for rain. Or, more importantly, that the deadly cholera disease was spread by water-borne bacteria instead of visited upon us by a disapproving God.
This change, of course brought many benefits in technology as we moved away from faith and superstition – this is why we should not discount reductionism and all its benefits – but it also meant that the world of science (naturally enough) became removed from uncertainty. The old methods were gradually discredited by scientific fact and humans came to value certainty more and more as they felt the benefits directly.
These benefits were felt as much in medicine and healing (which I will expand on in the next post, and is why I am including these posts at all) as they were in transport, communications, business, and technology.
(There are two Endnotes in a later post that will expand further on this post for those who are interested).