| Before Galileo used a telescope to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, cosmologists "knew" that Earth was at the center of the universe. Before Darwin’s theory of evolution, naturalists "knew" that all species had been created unchangeably by God at The Beginning. Before Pasteur discovered germs, doctors "knew" that disease was caused by a kind of invisible miasma in the air. What people "knew" conditioned everything they did and everything they thought about the world around them. And after their knowledge changed, the world they lived in was no longer the same. History is full of such pivotal moments, when our perceptions are altered by new data. We move from version to version, confident that the latest is the most complete and accurate description of the world so far. This in itself is the expression of a new attitude. It did not exist before the late nineteenth century, when change in one limited area of knowledge altered our view of everything. When Darwin published his epoch-making Origin of Species, advancing the theory of evolution, the concept of progression was born and with it the view that history is a process of change for the better. Only a few years later, in the early years of the twentieth century, Einstein's theory of relativity cut the ground from under that view and replaced it with an attitude whose relative nature found formidable support in the 1920s from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, in which he showed how all that could be known about the most fundamental elements of existence would be the product of the artifacts used to examine them. Subatomic particles could have either position or velocity, depending on how they were examined, but never both at once. The universe was what we said it was. The state of knowledge at any time has profound and wide-ranging effects on the contemporary culture. The Aristotelian view of the universe, which held sway up until the time when Copernicus and Galileo modified it, described a cosmos with Earth at the center, surrounded by the sun, moon, planets, and stars all mounted on rotating, concentric spheres of invisible unearthly matter. This view of the universe supported the Christian concept of humankind at the center of everything, the special creation of God. In this scheme of things, God's church had supreme authority, and since Aristotle's cosmos was also fixed and unchanging (with everything established by God at Creation), there was a proper place for everything and everything was in its proper place. This meant that society too, was rigid and its hierarchy the reflection of God's plan. Princes in such a scheme ruled, unquestioned, by Divine Right and through the authority of the Church. But when the great comet of 1577 showed by its trajectory that there were no fixed spheres in the sky (or it would have been crashing through them) and that the heavens were, after all, liable to change, the event triggered a new approach to the investigation that would question all traditional authority and turn the fixed order of Aristotle's world upside down. Changes in knowledge also take effect in ways that change what things mean. Before the advent of nineteenth-century medical technology and the discovery of bacteria, a doctor was a servant like an interior decorator or a barber. Since then, the investigation of disease and the discovery of techniques to control it have given doctors power equaled in the past by only priests and shamans. This, in turn, has changed the way society defines behavior. What was once criminal activity is now described in clinical terminology such as "aberrant," "sick," or "psychotic." New knowledge often causes so much social damage that it can sometimes bring an entirely new view of knowledge itself. The discovery of America by Columbus weakened the European authority systems of the time because the existence of the new continent made nonsense of the knowledge on which their power rested. Maple syrup, pineapples, tapirs, and chocolate were novelties that had not formed part of the classical corpus of natural history. There were also rainforests in the South, where it had always been thought only hot deserts could be. Above all, the Bible had not even mentioned America. The widespread panic that followed Columbus's discovery gave rise to demands for a system of knowledge that would prove more reliable. The direct result was the work of Bacon and Descartes, the rise of reductionism and methodical doubt, and the emergence of what we call science, whose single aim is to find security in knowledge by dedicating all its time to disprove theories. Ever since Bacon and Descartes, we live with the expectation that knowledge will continue to change and with it the beliefs and the values by which we live. ... Change is now the only constant and, as was said after the publication of the Copernican view of the solar system, "the new philosophy calls all in doubt.” ... If all knowledge is relative, constrained by its contemporary circumstance, to be negated by the next development, then is there any truth to seek? Or is it we who, in manufacturing knowledge, make the universe what it is, each time? | — James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo's Telescope Changed The Truth and Other Events in History That Dramatically Altered Our Understanding of the World | Indexes/22 |
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