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Overview
How does science progress? Most people believe that it happens in small steps. We think that every scientist builds on the work of those who came before them, and makes incremental improvements over time.
The idea of science progressing gradually is a myth. Science does not move forward in small steps; instead, it makes big leaps. Each new discovery wipes out the last one and replaces it with something completely different. These three points explain how this happens:
In this article, you’ll learn that science can be viewed in two ways. Scientists spend a lot of time cleaning up after themselves and making sure their work is correct because they’re always careful to avoid errors.
Big Idea #1: Scientific progress relies on paradigms, the shared frameworks of accepted theories and knowledge.
Imagine a laboratory. Do you see a man in a white coat mixing chemicals and beakers filled with strange substances?
Experiments aren’t always done randomly. Scientists know what they want to test and can predict the outcome of an experiment before it’s conducted.
Scientists can make predictions because of a framework that governs scientific work. For example, Newton’s laws are part of the paradigm that scientists use when they’re doing their research.
It’s crucial to share knowledge among scientists. This shared knowledge gives them a foundation on which they can build upon and expand the ideas of others.
Ultimately, a paradigm can only be a framework and cannot explain everything. There will always be gaps in our knowledge and disjunctions between scientific theory and hard reality.
That’s why scientists spend most of their time trying to understand the knowledge gaps and align theory with reality. For instance, Newton’s ideas were brilliant but the equipment he used was rudimentary. This created certain ambiguities that led to our deeper understanding of Newtonian laws through rigorous research conducted over centuries by scientists using advanced equipment.
Scientists know what they’re doing and why, so they don’t expect to produce anything surprising.
Scientists who aren’t looking for new discoveries often find them anyway.
Big Idea #2: Encountering anomalies in their research forces scientists to reconsider existing paradigms.
Scientists typically know what results to expect when conducting experiments. However, the outcome doesn’t always align with their expectations. Why is this?
In order to address ambiguities in the paradigm, scientists become more sophisticated over time. This is partly because they have specialties and devote a lot of their time to mopping up relatively small issues in an existent paradigm.
Quantum physics is a branch of science that deals with the very small. It claims that there are many particles in the universe that have not yet been discovered, and scientists search for them by creating complex instruments. The more we learn about quantum physics, however, the more anomalies we find—things that don’t fit into our understanding of it.
Sometimes, a scientist will have to go beyond the current theory and find out more about what is happening. This might lead to further discoveries that challenge how we think things work.
When new discoveries emerge, scientists will try to explain what went wrong with the old theories. They’ll create a few hypotheses and then experimentally test them. After some time, they’ll come up with some new theories that might threaten the credibility of all previous ones.
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X-rays are a great example of how science works. It all started with an experiment that produced results that were unexpected, and then the scientist conducted more research to prove his theory. However, many people tried to disregard the discovery because it was shocking at first. But eventually, evidence proved that X-rays exist and changed our understanding of the world forever.
