This is another one of these add-on posts I include for the more curious among you! If you have no interest in the history of the science of measurement you can skip directly to the next post where I offer a few concluding remarks on nurture.
Experimentation: Over the past 300+ years what is known as classical mechanics has been the most important method of gathering information on scientific matters and using that information to develop theories which were then applied experimentally to invent things that were useful to humanity.
Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace laid down the mathematical foundations for the above-mentioned classical mechanics, which has been a major influence on our world – principally because it is straightforward to explain, is based on principles that can be readily understood, and follow what most people believe is logical reasoning and common sense.
In experimentation, this kind of scientific enquiry (based on classical mechanics) is principally focused on observation and then measurement of what is observed. If the entity under exploration has too many parts or variables to observe and measure, it is broken down (reduced) into components that are and if those components are still too varied, they are broken down again, until the smallest unit that can be observed and measured is reached. This is known as reductionism.
Almost all advances in technology during and after the era that we call the Industrial Revolution were based on classical mechanics or derivations therefrom. This implies that our forefathers never thought about human influence! But this is not true.
René Descartes and others proposed the philosophy of dualism. This thinking brought the influence of the human mind into the frame, and how our intentions influence the result of a supposedly objective experiment. Gottfried Leibnitz, in Germany in the 1600’s, debated the effect of human relationships on science with Newton, but his arguments struggled to gain traction in science in general.
Certainty/Uncertainty: The thinking on how our world (indeed, our Universe) was constructed underwent great change in the early 20th Century due to developments by scientists like Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. Rather than the Universe being made up of matter alone, quantum mechanics and modern physics suggested that the Universe was a constant dance between energy and matter.
This challenged the idea that all matter could be reduced to an entity (such as an atom, or an electron, etc.) and that mathematical calculations could predict, with certainty, what the entities will do under whatever forces are acting on them.
The new uncertainty paradigm suggested that how we feel about something, what angle we observe a phenomenon from, how we think about the result etc. may determine the course of the process, and therefore the result. (See also this post)
The acknowledgment that uncertainty was important had implications for culture, society, the arts, family, labour relations, organisations and almost all aspects of our lives.
Paradoxically, the major advances in understanding of physics that arose from Heisenberg and colleagues’ work led, over the decades, to an increase in certainty. One of the big differences between the world that we live in now and the world that we lived in a hundred years ago was the arrival of the digital age. Almost every aspect of our lives is now ruled by 1 or 0, is or isn’t, all or nothing. This is in contrast to life up to even a short 30 years ago, when everything was analogue – or far less certain. Our time is now 10.15 instead of a quarter past ten. The photos we take, the music we listen to, the cars we drive, the laptop that I am using, the phone we use to ring our friends, etc. are all digital.
I’m not sure what the long term effect of digitisation, or, living in an all or nothing world will have on our relationships; but it is bound to have some effect!