Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality

by Richard H. Schlagel

  As supporting evidence of these two crucial influences, science and democracy, astrophysicist Carl Sagan stated in his incredibly informed book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: “At the Constitutional Convention of 1789 John Adams repeatedly appealed to the analogy of mechanical balance in machines . . .”; “James Madison used chemical and biological metaphors in The Federalist Papers”; and Thomas Jefferson, who described himself as a scientist, wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “that we all must have the same opportunities, the same ‘unalienable’ Rights,”2 though sadly this did not include women and slaves. As Jefferson adds:

  In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demonhaunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. (p. 434)

  In this book I shall describe the three past revolutionary scientific transitions that radically transformed our conceptions of the universe and human existence. I also argue that given the enormity and complexity of the universe the traditional scientific goal of a “unified final theory” should be replaced by the theoretical framework of “contextual realism.”3 Rather than seeking a final theoretical framework to explain all empirical evidence as most scientists of the past intended, we should realize that such inquiries are conducted within successively deeper and expanding conditional but nonetheless real physical contexts of the universe that appear to be endless.

  Turning to the first scientific transformation of our conception of reality, while the Egyptians and Mesopotamians had made significant contributions in astronomy, mathematics, biology, and medicine that antedated the scientific inquiries of the ancient Greeks, it is generally conceded that it was the latter who first began a systematic attempt to attain a more empirical-rational understanding of the universe by replacing the previous mythological and theological accounts with empirical observations, logical and mathematical reasoning, and rational explanations.

  For instance, it was the Greek Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines who, in the sixth century BCE, rejected a divine creator of the universe for naturalistic explanations in terms of Water (Thales), an Unbounded (Anaximander), and an Air-Substrate (Anaximines) and adopted such ordinary explanatory principles as “separating off” or “condensation and evaporation” to explain how our current universe came to be from that original state. Though an admirable effort, this attempted unified explanation is now referred to as the “Ionian fallacy.”

  Another extremely gifted person whose influence extended throughout the centuries (string theory in physics is a modern example) was the Ionian philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, also from the sixth century, who was a musician, mathematician, astronomer, mystic, and founder of the Pythagorean philosophical and religious school in Croton. Reputed to be an accomplished lutenist, this facilitated several of his unique mathematical discoveries, the first being that the intervals of musical scales in which the consonances and successive octaves could be expressed in numerical ratios comprising the first four integers. This was followed by his speculation that the motion of the planets emits a musical harmony called the “Music of the Spheres,” though too remote to be heard by human ears.

  Among his other mathematical discoveries were irrational numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, the tetractys (a triangular figure of four rows of numbers that add up to the perfect number ten), and that spatial configurations can be created from “arithmogeometric units”—e.g., an extended line drawn from two points, plane figures such as triangles and rectangles from several lines, a circle from a joined curved line, and three-dimensional spatial objects such as pyramids cubes, spheres, and complex polyhedra from plane figures. As Aristotle states, based on these inquires “the Pythagoreans . . . construct the whole universe out of numbers—only not numbers consisting of abstract units: they suppose the units to have spatial magnitude.”4

  Thus the Pythagoreans were able to represent the four elements of the physical world—earth, air, fire, and water—by four polyhedra: the earth by the 4-sided pyramid or tetrahedron, air by the 6-sided cube, fire by the 8-sided octahedron, water by the 20-sided icosahedron, and the universe itself by the 12-sided dodecahedron. Because Plato apparently assigned different polyhedra to the four elements, explaining their disintegration and reconfiguration as due to the separation and recombination of their constituent plane figures, they came to be known as “the five Platonic solids.” Kepler in the early seventeenth century began his astronomical theorizing in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery) with the five polyhedra of Pythagoras perhaps as revised by Plato. Other of their astronomical contributions also were extremely important, such as Eudoxus of Cnidus who made the determination of the solar year to be 365 days and five hours, along with originating the long-prevailing view that the celestial bodies revolve on a series of concentric spheres with the earth in the center.

  His pupil Callippus of Cyzicus increased his number of spheres to thirty-four to account for certain astronomical irregularities that were adopted by Aristotle. But Philolaus of Croton, in 259 BCE, astutely assigned “an oblique circular motion” to the earth around a central fire while Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantos of Syracuse attributed to it an axial rotation from west to east to explain the apparent rising and setting of the sun, along with determining that Mercury and Venus revolve around the sun. This culminated in Aristarchus of Samos’s prescient sun-centered astronomical theory in the third century BCE, though eclipsed by Ptolemy’s geocentrism until Copernicus’s adoption of heliocentrism.

  These celestial innovations were complemented by such empirical theories as Empedocles’ conception of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, as basic; Anaxagoras’ rejection of Empedocles’ four elements as too limited, declaring that the original mixture consisted of an infinite number of infinitely divisible particles that were representative of all the diversity of things, but too minute to be discernable except for air and aither; Leucippus’ and Democritus’ astute atomic theory that the underlying matter of the universe consisted of solid, indivisible, insensible particles that varied in their size, shapes, solidity, and motions, excluding sensory qualities.5

  However, deriding such empirical explanations Plato, in his famous “allegory of the cave,” described sensory knowledge as mere reflections of the imperfect material objects in the physical world or “Receptacle,” declaring that mathematics could free one from these perceptual illusions to ascend to the intelligible world of perfect archetypes, the “Realm of Forms,” culminating in the “Form of the Good” and the “Demiurge.” Apparently the latter was the creator of the real world by imposing the ideal archetypes on the imperfect Receptacle.6 It was Plato’s philosophy that was the most influential during the medieval period because of its easy conformity with Christianity, interpreting his Demiurge as God.

  Yet it was not Plato’s philosophy but that of his pupil Aristotle that would prove the most dominant from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century following the syntheses of his philosophy with Christianity by Thomas Aquinas. Rejecting Plato’s methodology that relied on mathematics for attaining knowledge of the Forms because Aristotle thought it only applied to abstract magnitudes, not to the empirical world, he created the formalism of logic for deducing specific physical properties from empirical premises stating their genus and species derived from empirical inductions.

  There were three major factors explaining the greater acceptance of his philosophy. First, that his basis of knowledge relying on ordinary perceptions, as interpreted within his schema of the four causes, made it less abstract and idealistic and more empirically amenable. These included the “material cause” (the physical composition of objects eventuating in “prime matter)”; the “formal cause” delineating the “species, genus, and definitions to which it belonged”; the “efficient cause” that produces the interactio
ns and changes in nature; and the “final cause” or “end of which” an object or process aims. This final cause involving the actualization of an inherent potentiality added to the appeal because it suited the general conception at the time that all events had an innate purpose.

  It was in The Prior Analytics that Aristotle created syllogistic logic as his methodology for proving the existence of specific physical properties and efficient and final causes by deducing them from inductive general premises specifying the particular genus, species, or definition of the object. As illustrated in his classic examples: one can prove that Socrates is mortal in the syllogism “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal” or demonstrating why, in contrast to the stars, the planets do not twinkle, from the premise “No proximate celestial body twinkles, the planets are such proximate bodies, therefore the planets do not twinkle.” He concluded that since the middle terms, such as ‘men’ and ‘proximate celestial body’ conjoining the premises provided the proof, they were not merely verbal connections but the actual causes of the conclusion stating that “in all our inquiries we are asking either whether there is a ‘middle’ or what the ‘middle’ is: for the ‘middle’ here is precisely the cause, and it is the cause that we seek in our inquiries.”7

  Yet it is not just this formal methodology that accounted for Aristotle’s tremendous influence, but also the extraordinary range of his research covering nearly every known area of human experience at the time. This includes, in addition to his writings on ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetics, categories, and logic, works “On the Heavens,” “On the Soul,” “Metaphysics,” “Physics,” “Generation and Corruption,” “Memory, Dreams, and Prophesying,” along with the “History, Parts, and Generation of Animals.” I think it can be said that no other thinker ever matched Aristotle in the range and quality (for the time) of his extensive research. Charles Darwin was so impressed by his biological writings that he wrote: “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods [. . .] but they were mere school-boys compared to old Aristotle.”8

  The third factor responsible for his immense influence was his geocentric cosmology that seemed most congruent with our ordinary observations with its distinction between the perfect celestial and imperfect terrestrial worlds involving their contrasting natures and motions: the celestial or heavenly bodies consisting of an aetherial substance and having inherent circular and uniform motions while the terrestrial world consisted of the four Empedoclean elements (earth, air, fire, and water), each with its inherent rectilinear motion upward or downward on the stationary earth. Thus it was Aristotle’s more common-sense cosmological system, as emended by Ptolemy and defended by the Scholastics, that generally prevailed from about the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries and was mainly the system that had to be replaced by the scientific inquiries of Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, the latter declaring that his “two main adversaries were Aristotle and Descartes.”

  Before turning to the next historical period and major scientific contributions in ancient Greece, some mention should be made of the secular philosophy and influence of Epicurus (341–270 BCE) as poetically transposed and popularized by the Roman poet Lucretius (ca. 96–ca. 55) owing to most of Epicurus’ works being destroyed by the burning of the library in Alexandria.

  Born on the Island of Samos, Epicurus left for Athens to study the philosophies of Democritus and Plato and where he later purchased a house and garden that did not serve like the more prestigious academic institutions of Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum, but as a sheltered enclave where his followers, including women and slaves, could listen to his inspired teachings and discuss his numerous books. Primarily concerned with the ethical question of how to live a tranquil life in a world of conflicts, adversity, and suffering, he accepting that the gods existed due to the universal belief in them and the images (eidola) they conveyed in dreams and mystical experiences, yet he denied they exerted any influence on human affairs, being divine and involved in their own peaceful existence.

  He believed that the universe, including our bodies and our souls, consists of atoms and the void. He even introduced the prescient theory that the various sizes and shapes of the atoms could be explained by their being composed of “internal minima,” which, like the present-day quarks, help account for their physical characteristics yet cannot exist separately or independently. Though adopting Democritus’ atomism he denied his strict determinism, introducing a spontaneous “swerve” in the formation of the world to account for its diversity and novelty and to explain free will. Denying religions as superstitions, he believed in an infinite, eternal universe that did not require a creator. Since souls consist of atoms they do not outlive the body and thus one does not have to fear any retribution after death which is the termination of life.

  Although Epicurus’ ethics was based on the fact that human beings are primarily driven by their desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain, he was aware that not all pleasures are desirable, many are accompanied by painful consequences, thus they must be chosen wisely. The following verse (as translated from the Greek) etched on a wall in Herculeum expresses his ethical philosophy.

  There is nothing to fear in God

  There is nothing to feel in death;

  What is good is easily procured

  What is bad is easily endured.

  It is thanks to the recovery by Poggio Bracciolini of the epic poem of Lucretius, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) in a remote monastery library in Herculaneum in 1417, that we have some glimpses into Epicurus’ philosophy as presented in Lucretius’s extraordinary rendition. Although written in eloquent hexameter verse rather than philosophic prose, it represents the most advanced, rational, and realistic worldview of ancient philosophy. As Fox states in his The Classical World, previously cited:

  I have tried in this book to tell a little known but exemplary Renaissance story, the story of Poggio Bracciolini’s recovery of On the Nature of Things. The recovery has the virtue of being true to the term that we use to gesture toward the cultural shift at the origins of modern life and thought: a renaissance, a rebirth, of antiquity. One poem by itself was certainly not responsible for an entire intellectual, oral, and social transformation—no single work was, let alone one that for centuries could not without danger be spoken about freely in public. But his particular ancient book suddenly returning to view made a difference. (p. 11)

  Over seventeen centuries would elapse before it was confirmed that the ordinary world was actually composed of what Epicurus still referred to as Democratean atoms but Lucretius called “first things” or “the seeds of things.” They were eternal, unchanging, imperceptible, ultimate particles that exist in an infinite spatial void whose constant motions and interactions create the great diversities of nature along with their destructions, since everything thus created is perishable except the particles themselves. As this includes our souls along with our bodies they, too, decompose when we die, even though they are of a finer nature, and thus there is no afterlife. In this way Epicurus and Lucretius eliminated the suffering and retributions that were the greatest fears instilled by religions, especially the Christian Inquisition, one of the most terrifying periods in history. And there is no purpose to existence, just the natural occurrences produced by the imperishable particles.

  Though he was not an atheist since, like Epicurus, Lucretius did not deny the existence of the gods, claiming that they were entirely too exalted and involved in their own affairs to be concerned with humankind. Rejecting an ethics based on divine moral principles and reinforced by the threat of eternal damnation or the reward of a beatific afterlife that they regarded as delusional, they defined the highest ethical principle as the “enhancement of pleasure and reduction of pain,” according to Fox (p. 195).

  Though aware that the needs and desires of mankind, such as the satisfaction of sexual drives, nutritional needs, and shelter, along wi
th the gratifications that come with the attainment of prestige, power, and fame must be fulfilled to some extent Lucretius, like Epicurus, stressed moderation. They both considered that a tranquil existence with reasonable and wholesome pleasures is the ultimate goal in life and more easily attained than a voluptuous, hedonistic, despotic, God-fearing life. Having declared that the original particles move in a random, deterministic way but realizing that ethics requires free will Lucretius, as did Epicurus, introduced a “swerve” to allow some novelty in nature and freedom of the will. Fox again presents a very concise but accurate summary of Lucretius’s poetic rendition of the Epicurean philosophy.

  The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies–—all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance–—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate–—is, Lucretius insisted, the good news. (p. 199)

  What an enlightened conception of reality that still is not accepted by a majority of Americans and other civilizations, though increasingly acknowledged by Europeans.

  Returning to our historical narrative, Aristotle’s death in 322 BCE followed by that of Alexander the Great a year later, coincided with the usual date 323 BCE given for the termination of the Hellenic classical period. This was succeeded by the Hellenistic Age, conventionally dating from the accession of Alexander the Great to the Macedonian throne in 336 BCE after the death of his father King Phillip, to the death of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII, in 30 BCE, although including some later Hellenistic scholars. The year before his untimely death Alexander had designated the port city Alexandria in Egypt as his namesake, but his empire having been divided into three portions after his death, with General Ptolemy taking control of Alexandria, the growth of the port into the largest and most prestigious Hellenistic city is due to the wise governing of the Ptolemaic dynasty that endured for about three centuries.