Audiobook: The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke
The Day the Universe Changed
If you’re a layperson like me, you’ll probably follow until the whole light is a particle and a wave thing. That’s when things get sticky.
But the Grayline bus tour of developments-in-science is not the point of the book. After this first section is done, the conclusions presented by James Burke are what’s interesting and worthwhile.
He says that science is not truth. It’s not even reality.
As he had shown in the first part of the book, science is an understanding. Understandings are limited by the expectations and knowledge of any given time period in human history.
Yes, science (really understandings) changes according to observations, but it also changes according to differences in general overall thought. For example, which form of government is believed to be best at any given time?
He points out that observations are often discounted because we, and our ancestors, just assumed that we simply did not come up with the right experimental model or do not have the correct technology to see what actually should be.
The scientific method asks us to posit a hypothesis first. This hypothesis already assumes certain things to be true. In other words—scientists start with the limitations of their own contemporary understandings.
These first principles (if you will) have rarely been over turned. He points to Aristotle and Newton as the foundations of certain scientific first principles. The understandings of these two men influenced human thought and science for hundreds and thousands of years.
We are now past a Newtonian model of the world, but scientific change does not equal scientific progress. Burke says that we simply hold a different cosmic understanding that is not necessarily better or worse than any other. It’s certainly not more or less correct.
All this shocked me. I had never thought of science in this manner. He especially woke me up when he compared science to religion by saying that both seek to assure people, tells humans of their place in the world, and depends on the acceptance of first principles.
Since finishing this audiobook, I really feel that my worldview has shifted.
Audiobook Challenge status: ten completed, two to go.
[...] The first, by James Burke, focuses mainly on science and uses the history of scientific thought to demonstrate how scientific ideas do not stand on their own but change according to the understandings of each era. Chet Raymo’s work has a different goal. He wants scientists to acknowledge the benefits that the arts and humanities can bring to scientific work. [...]
[...] The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke [...]