The first is from the early days of astronomy. When European people first started debating whether the Sun went around the Earth or whether the Earth went around the Sun, the following argument was set forth to prove that the Earth could not be circling the Sun.
If the Earth is circling the Sun, then the position of the Earth must be changing all the time and in six months time, the Earth would be on the opposite side of its orbit from where it currently is. If our position changed that much every six months, then we should see an apparent shift in position of the stars (in the same way that the view of a finger held before the eyes seems to jump back and forth if one closes first one eye and then the other). But such a movement is not detected. Therefore the Earth can not be circling the Sun.
This argument was scientifically accurate and so had a forceful argument on rational people. If the Earth did circle the Sun, there should be an apparent shifting of star position. (This apparent shift is called parallax. The only thing wrong with the argument was the totally unthinkable (at that time) possibility that the stars might be so far away that their parallax would be so tiny as to be undetectable by naked eye observations. (Nowdays, we can detect and measure the parallaxes of nearer stars.) So a valid argument (of parallax) armed with an incorrect assumptions (of stellar nearness) helped lock in another incorrect assumption (of the Earth NOT going around the Sun).
The other story is from my geology classes in college. I really enjoyed Geology 101. It made so much sense and it opened and deepened my vision of the world through time so that I could see changes and patterns I was previously oblivious to. So I followed up with another course, Historical Geology. It was taught by the melancholy chairman of the department. That class did not hold together so well. The older text had maps of how North America had changed through time but there was no continuity, no fundamental rightness to it. And then the text got to a section on mountain building. And that section lost me. It was so academic and so abstract and it just didn’t amplify the world the way Geology 101 had. Mountain building did not resonate and deepen my experience of mountains like stream dynamics or coastline processes had. Nevertheless, I took another geology class the next semester. It was taught by new, young geologists and their brand new text was full of the evidence for plate tectonics. And the ideas sang and mountains again became a visible hymn.
Not until 15 years later, having read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and McPhee’s Assembling California did I fully realize that I had been a student right in the midst of one of the great scientific revolutions in history- that of continental drift and plate tectonics. Now I suspect the chairman was so melancholy because he was part of the old school fading. Now I know why those older texts lost me; because they were wrong at a deep paradigm level. More importantly, my aesthetic response to the two theories strengthens my belief that science is guided by an aesthetic fundamental to the nature of the world. The deep nature of the world is of pieces fitting together because the universe is interconnected multi-dimensionally. We have a stereotype of the scientist as dispassionate. On the contrary, scientists are enthusiastically passionate, guided by an aesthetics open to all, repeatable over and over. It is one of the things I love about being in the presence of a scientist.
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