Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality

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

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
dis
belief 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 difference 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 Assaye
r
: “[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.