eventually building up to paradigm
shifts or conceptual phase transitions affecting all aspects of a culture. It
is these major shifts that we shall now seek to isolate.
The Greeks of the 6th and 5th centuries BC were amazingly prescient and surprisingly
they managed to formulate many of the questions with which, 2500 years later,
we are still grappling today. An almost total lack of technology meant that
their intelligent guesses remained just that, guesses. With a few notable exceptions,
physical confirmation of any hypothesis was beyond their means. However what
they were able to do was to organise thought into separate disciplines we still
follow. They laid out the foundations on which all subsequent learning was built,
divided into major categories such as Social and Political Science, History,
Arts, Medicine, Botany, Astronomy, Mathematics, Geometry and of course the unifying
subject of Philosophy whose principal investigative tool was logically rigorous
intellectual analysis. This was the Greeks’ everlasting contribution to
progress, intellectual rigor, and although it wavered and wandered over time,
it finally came to dominate Western thought again during the Renaissance. Throughout
its peregrinations this notion continued to gather layers in the form of sophisticated
mathematical tools originating in India and the Arab world. This marvellous
development led directly to the first major conceptual shift, the realisation
that nature follows regular patterns or Laws, which can be expressed or modelled
through the use of mathematical relationships or formulas. The notion that nature
is not casual happenstance, a random anthology of unrelated anecdotes, but is
in fact coordinated by strict application of organising rules which can be modelled
by mathematical logic, the Laws of Nature, was the single most important breakthrough
in the development of human thought. This insight constituted a cultural phase
transition transforming analytical thought from the realm of intuition and vague
hypothesis to that of measurable, quantifiable, proven fact, a process which
was necessarily mediated by availability of relevant mathematical techniques
and measuring instruments.
Eventually this natural-mathematical insight, combined with the Greek notion
of rigorous methodology, led to the idea of probing nature through the use of
strategically designed experiments, accompanied by appropriate recording systems
used as analytical tools. As this idea gained ground, it was adopted by ever
more researchers in an increasingly greater variety of disciplines, so that
by the early 19th century a large number of natural phenomena had been discovered
and investigated. Many of these eventually began to merge into groups as common
characteristics, such as those uniting electricity and magnetism, became evident.
This process finally gave birth to the concept of “universality”,
the principle that certain types and probably all phenomena can be grouped into
“Universality Classes” which apply equally across the whole spectrum
of space and time, at all scales and epochs of the universe. The paradigmical
example is Newton and his famous apple, realising that orbiting of planets attracted
by the sun was exactly the same phenomenon as objects falling to the ground
attracted by the Earth’s gravity. It is in fact clear to us now that all
scientific insight is precisely this process of universalising, seeing that
some particular process we are observing is analogous to a class of phenomena
across a whole range of scales and epochs. I should like to characterise this
concept of universality as the original, seminal method of enquiry because it
underlies all advances in knowledge and understanding, although it was not formally
codified as such by the scientific community until quite recently.
Inevitably, out of this surge of 19th century experimentation and scientific
enquiry, came the proof that was waiting since early Greece, the proof that
things do not remain forever static, that things change in time and lead eventually
to other things, evolution. Although when Darwin published in 1859, he only
applied the principle to biological species, it was not long, only 65 years
in fact, before the Big Bang arrived, demonstrating that everything in our universe
evolves constantly. Universal Evolution was now firmly established as the second
major conceptual phase transition, and truly nothing will ever be the same again.
Although scientists may not have realised it at the time, acceptance of the
transitory nature of nature permitted the latest conceptual breakthrough to
emerge, that which I shall call ephemerality. This tells us that nothing really
exists, at least no thing actually exists in a material sense. Quantum mechanics
appears to show that a particle can manifest itself in several remote places
at one and the same time. More significantly, physics has made it clearly evident
that these “elementary” particles of which “matter”
is made up are nothing more than constantly shifting bundles of energy which,
furthermore, are subject to change
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