The need for a need
25 Jan 2024
I had this very interesting discussion the day before, and just wanted to share thoughts about here and just the overall impact it has had on my perspective on science.
This discussion stemmed from a book that I was reading the days prior called the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn. I reflected upon what I have read so far and wanted to share it with the class. It was rather interesting book from which I understood about how there are “paradigm shifts” that alter how the scientific process is carried out and what new theories are made.
The general assumption is that science grows through incremental accumulation of the previous works of others. Basically, “building upon the shoulders of giants”. It interesting because it relates to many other fields where the same process of “layering” occurs. Although, there are certain serendipitous moments where scientific intuition leads to a thought that can be developed as a separate theory outside of the normal method of expansion within science, which is cool.
Physics and the field of Maths has developed from the state of “need”. People needed Physics and Maths to solve and uncover how certain natural phenomena worked, which drove them to develop theories and axioms. Without a need, these concepts simply would not come to fruition because there wouldn’t be a need.
Then there came the discussion of how people are resistant to new ideas and theories. In the past, people simply did not accept negative numbers because of how naturally distant they were from the framework of negative values. For example, one simply could not have imagined what “-1 carrot” would be, I think it was not a matter of the complexity of abstraction, but rather just the impossibility to do so as any imagination wouldn’t be grounded on an existing example of what a negative value may be. From this, people slowly started to understand the abstract concept that is negative numbers. This reminded me of an interview of Richard Feynman when the interviewer asked: “Why do magnets repel each other?” Feynman responded with: “When you explain a Why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise you are perpetually asking why.” (there was some prior dialogue to this, but that would make this entry a little too exhaustive, but you get the idea) This struck out to me as interesting as it felt that this was something that should be tacitly known, but I realised, in my classes of Chemistry, I simply did not understand the why of things because I did not have the framework that Feynman explains due to my lack of experience and foundation within the subject, which is why things do not make sense at all, regardless of how vigorous you are in revision.
From this, we talked about how our misunderstanding of “negative numbers” in the past when “-1 carrots” could not be conceived is analogous to our misunderstanding of the Big Bang now, where we simply can’t seem to form a concrete conclusion about what happened before the Big Bang exception for inflation. This could even be brought to different visualisations of higher dimensions and so on.
Anyways, one could talk about how many of this may have been historically baseless or so on, but these are just ramblings of thought, discard at will!