Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality

by Richard H. Schlagel

  ALSO BY RICHARD H. SCHLAGEL

  Animism to Archimedes

  Contextual Realism: A Metaphysical Framework for Modern Science

  Forging the Methodology that Enlightened Modern Civilization

  From Myth to Modern Mind, Vol. I, Theogony Through Ptolemy

  From Myth to Modern Mind, Vol. II,

  Copernicus Through Quantum Mechanics

  Seeking the Truth: How Science Has Prevailed

  over the Supernatural Worldview

  The Vanquished Gods: Science, Religion, and the Nature of Belief

  Published 2015 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality. Copyright © 2015 by Richard H. Schlagel. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Schlagel, Richard H., 1925-

  Three scientific revolutions : how they transformed our conceptions of reality / by Richard H. Schlagel.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-63388-032-0 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-63388-033-7 (e-book)

  1. Science—History. 2. Science—Greece--History. 3. Science—History—20th century. 4. Science—Philosophy. I. Title.

  Q125.S4145 2015

  509--dc23

  2015001969

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to my beloved wife, Josephine.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Chapter I The First Transition Owing to the Natural Philosophic Inquiries During the Greek Hellenic and Hellenistic Period

  Chapter II The Second Transition Owing to the Creation of Modern Classical Science

  Chapter III The Culminating Achievement of Newton

  Chapter IV The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ Advances, Including Inquiries in Magnetism and Electricity

  Chapter V The Origins of Chemistry and Modern Atomism

  Chapter VI Transition to the Third Reality in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  Chapter VII Construction of the Atom in the Twentieth Century

  Chapter VIII The Impending Fourth Transition Along with the Future Prospects of Science

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  I am dismayed that there is such a large number of Americans who are so ignorant about or indifferent to the contributions of science to our understanding of the universe and human existence that they continue to believe incredible religious doctrines. As examples, all seven of the republican candidates who ran in the 2012 presidential primary declared their disbelief in evolution on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence, even though probably no scientific theory has more supporting empirical confirmation considering the discoveries of transitional fossil remains extending back millions of years and the ancestral genealogical record replicated in the human genome. What other explanatory religious evidence can Christians offer to explain the transitions and diversity of species?

  Moreover, not one of the basic theological doctrines or rituals of Christianity any longer has any rational credibility: for example, Mary’s reputed immaculate conception in terms of what we now know about bisexual reproduction, along with specific references in several Gospels to Jesus’ brothers and sisters; or Jesus’ virgin birth, which would have lacked the essential twenty-four male chromosomes; his miracles such as walking on water, multiplying loaves of bread, raising Lazarus from the dead; and the discrepant Gospel accounts of his reappearing after his crucifixion in human form that supposedly confirmed his divinity. One of the essential rituals of Christianity is the Eucharist or Holy Communion during which the bread and wine, after being consecrated, are supposedly transubstantiated and consumed as the flesh and blood of Jesus, which is an impossible chemical transmutation (the scientific term) of substances, though still literally affirmed by the Catholic Church despite being denied even by noted Catholic theologian John Wycliffe as early as the fourteenth century.

  Hoping to mitigate this ignorance, I describe how major scientific advances produced three past revolutionary transformations in our conceptions of physical reality and human existence, beginning with the ancient Greeks and progressing to the present, refuting these implausible beliefs. In the final chapter I offer a summary of recent discoveries and forecasts of future advances as prologue to the fourth transition.

  The first transformation was the Hellenic and Hellenistic replacement of the previous mythical and theological attempts to explain the origin and nature of the universe and human existence with a partial empirical-rationalistic method of inquiry that was the precursor of modern classical science. Aristotle’s philosophy was still prevalent as late as the seventeenth century as indicated in Isaac Newton’s assertion that “Aristotle and Descartes are my main adversaries,” while each of the founders of modern classical science cited ancient Greeks as their predecessors.

  The second revolution was initiated by Copernicus’s rejection of the venerable geocentric conception of the universe stating in the introduction to his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres), published in 1543 and addressed to the ecclesiastic authorities, that even though it may seem absurd, since others had been granted the right, he too would assign a circular motion to the earth around the sun indicating that he could “correlate all the movements of the other planets . . . with the mobility of the earth.” It was this work that motivated Johannes Kepler to pursue astronomical research leading to his discovery of Tycho Brahe’s observations of the elliptical orbit of Mars, which convinced him that it was not the earth’s centrality but the sun’s emanations that produced the elliptical motion of the planets that enabled him to formulate his three astronomical laws accurately describing their orbital velocities and distances from the sun. This culminated in his conception of a “clockwork universe” with “gravity” as the key astronomical force producing their motions. Both conceptions were introduced prior to Newton who is usually given credit for formulating them!

  These discoveries coincided with Galileo’s amazing telescopic observations disclosing the incredible resemblance of the moon’s presumed astral surface to the earth’s terrestrial geology and the discovery of the “rings of Saturn” circling Jupiter, the “phases of Venus,” along with the seven stars known as the “Pleiades.” In addition, he observed innumerably more fixed stars implying that the universe was vastly more extensive than previously thought. His dramatic drawings of these observations showing the similarity of the moon’s celestial surface to the earth’s terrestrial terrain in the Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) fueled the controversy as to whether the earth or the sun was in the center of the solar system.

  It also was in the Sidereus Nuncius, after analyzing the differen
ce between the optical nature of astronomical observations and ordinary perceptual sensations such as colors, sounds, and heat, and influenced by his improved microscopic observations (analogous to the impact of his telescopic discoveries) that Galileo introduced the crucial causes later attributed to waves or “insensible particles.” As he states in The Assayer: “[m]any sensations which are deemed to be qualities residing in external objects have no real existence except in ourselves. . . . ”*

  Though defined in terms of observable properties such as sizes, shapes, masses, and motion, the insensible particles were devoid of sensory qualities such as colors, sounds, smells, tastes, or heat that are produced in us by their impact on our senses. This distinction first proposed by the ancient Greek philosophers, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus and known as imperceptibles or “atoms,” had been eclipsed owing to Empedocles’ acceptance of the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water, as being indestructible and thus basic. Galileo’s renewed distinction proved one of the most controversial conceptions in modern science and philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Given the disputes over his astronomical observations and whether the earth or the sun was the center of the solar system, Galileo decided to go to Rome to gain permission from Pope Urban VIII to publish a book on the evidence for the two worldviews. Urban gave his consent provided that Galileo treated the geocentric and the heliocentric positions impartially; but once the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (its English title) was published, obviously revealing Galileo’s preference for the heliocentric system, the pope concluded that he had been disobeyed.

  Thus Galileo was brought before the Inquisition of the Holy Office, was tried for heresy and found guilty, forcing him on his knees before the Commission to recant his support for heliocentrism on threat of imprisonment, torture, and perhaps death (in 1600 at the time that Kepler and Galileo were presenting their major discoveries Giordano Bruno was ordered burned at the stake in Rome by the Catholic Church for advocating such heretical ideas as an infinite universe). Yet insisting it was not his intention to support heliocentrism, Galileo was never punished but put under house arrest in his country villa in Arcetri for the rest of his life and ordered not to discuss astronomy or receive any visitors under penalty of imprisonment.

  It was there that he wrote his second most famous work entitled in English, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, in which he described his incline plane experiments demonstrating that a ball rolling down a smooth incline plane in equal times traverses distances proportional to the odd numbers beginning with 1:1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc., so that the square roots of the successive sums of the odd numbers give the progressive times of the descent. Dying a few years after his final publication, he was interred in the splendid church of Santa Croce in Florence and though the Grand Duke originally forbad any ornamental additions to his tomb, now there can be seen an exquisite sepulcher comparable to the one of Michelangelo across from his.

  These discoveries culminated in Newton’s deterministic cosmological theory of absolute space and time, along with his universal law of gravitation applying to both the celestial and terrestrial worlds, thus refuting their historic qualitative distinction. Moreover, his corpuscular-mechanistic universe incorporating Galileo’s submicroscopic particles set the agenda for much of the research during the following eighteenth century, known as the “Age of Enlightenment,” and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Among his other discoveries, Newton demonstrated with his prismatic experiments that light is not homogeneous, because when refracted through a prism it disperses into a spectrum of specific colors that he describes as rays radiated as corpuscles, contrary to the prevailing wave theory of light. He also proved the finite velocity of light. Yet as innovative as they were, these modern classical physicists still believed in a creator God, but (like Albert Einstein) they claimed that once the universe was created God did not intervene in it and so these physicists were usually known as deists rather than theists.

  The third revolution began in the latter nineteenth century with the discovery of such subatomic particles as the electron, proton, neutron, and proof of electromagnetism, along with Charles Darwin’s later evolutionary theory of natural selection. The twentieth century brought about further astonishing developments in particle physics culminating in two fundamental classes of particles, the fermions and bosons, plus the discovery of strong and weak nuclear forces. It also encompassed innovative advances in geology, paleontology, chemistry, biology, medicine, neurophysiology, and genetics, along with creating such significant theories as Max Planck’s quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theories of relativity, Niels Bohr’s solar model of the atom, Werner Heisenberg’s introduction of matrix mechanics and the uncertainty principle.

  It also comprised the vastly improved telescopes such as Edwin Hubble’s telescope at Mount Wilson’s Observatory in Los Angeles and even more powerful telescopes that by the end of the century disclosed a much more extensive universe with about 125 billion galaxies each consisting of trillions of stars, as well as the dramatic lunar landing confirming the geographical similarity of another planet to the earth. Furthermore, there was evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe following the big bang and the existence of black holes and dark energy about which we know very little and yet they apparently compose around 95 percent of the matter of the universe. Also, since the big bang itself presumably had a cause, this suggests that it must be an offshoot of another universe giving rise to the concept of multiverses.

  The final chapter discusses the current scientific advances that are a prologue to the impending fourth revolutionary transformation in our conception of reality and way of life. These include the vastly extended telescopic observations owing to the creation of such recent powerful telescopes as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Kepler Space Telescope, along with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to search among the trillions of exoplanets for evidence of the environmental conditions that would allow for the existence of living creatures and especially extraterrestrial intelligence. They also comprise interplanetary space explorations to seek a new home for terrestrial human beings when our planet becomes either uninhabitable or consumed by the eventual increase in radiant heat from the sun due to the latter’s future atmospheric changes.

  In addition, there is the fantastic progress in computer science and robotics that researchers predict will permit human beings to have each of their cranial neurons and synaptic connections replaced by electronic components and then encoded in a computer program or installed in the head of a robot and thus achieve a weird kind of programmed existence or robotic longevity. Equally fantastic are the anticipated medical advances plus genetic discoveries that will eliminate most health problems, along with the detection of the “aging genes” that will greatly extend our lifespan if there can be found another habitable planet to travel to and live on.

  The chapter also describes the latest attempt at a final unified theory, namely, string theory, which has not produced any empirical evidence and thus is unlikely to be a concluding theory thereby raising the question as to whether it is even possible. Given the seemingly unlimited dimensions and diversity of the universe, the previous scientific assumption that a final unified theory (that eluded Einstein) is attainable now seems to me to be improbable. If, due to limited knowledge and funds, no such theory is feasible, this obviously does not detract from the fact that Christianity and other world religions, along with philosophical metaphysical systems, are no longer credible in contrast to the formulation and adoption of the scientific methodology that produced the described transformations in our worldviews. In its place I have suggested the theory of “Contextual Realism” in a previous book by that title and mentioned later in the present book.

  Furthermore, I find more encouraging and promising the advances in genetics, such as heterochromatin, that will enable scientists to identify the essential genes at least p
artially responsible for the terrible cruelties, iniquities, and suffering pervading human existence. Just as geneticists have discovered the particular genes or systems of genes and the cellular fluids that direct the causes of human physical illnesses, they are now close to detecting the genetic causes that produce the greatest human atrocities: murders, rapes, assaults, repressions, injustices, deceptions, etc. Detected and deactivated they would enable us to improve human nature thereby supplementing or even replacing religion, parental guidance, and social laws as the major determinate influences directing human behavior. Considering the contentious, devastating, and depressing past history and present state of the world situation, I find the prospect of genetically improving human nature the most promising and admirable hope for the future, vastly preferable to being electronically programmed in a computer or installed in a robot.

  Chapter I

  THE FIRST TRANSITION OWING TO THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHIC INQUIRIES DURING THE GREEK HELLENIC AND HELLENISTIC PERIOD

  Considering that the United States emerged as the dominant world power after World War II due to its superior armaments, which were based on its advanced scientific and technological developments, and also to its being the freest and most prosperous country after defeating Russia in the Cold War, it is appalling how little most Americans know about and appreciate the reasons for these achievements—that it was the ancient Greeks who first initiated the scientific method of inquiry that contributed so greatly to America’s ascendance while the conception and adoption of democracy also was first introduced in Athens by Cleisthenes in 508 BCE. According to Robin Lane Fox, an ancient historian, in his The Classical World,

  in the spring of 508 BC ... Cleisthenes proposed ... that the [Athenian] constitution should be changed and that, in all things, the sovereign power should rest with the entire adult male citizenry. It was a spectacular moment, the first known proposal of democracy, the lasting example of the Athenians to the world.1