The Psychotechnic Institute begins to explain history with its paramathematics that is "'...a rigorous self-correcting symbology...'" (p. 125)
In James Blish's Midsummer Century, Thor Wald, born in 2060, invents a metalanguage that can explain time-projection. In Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, when Haertelism has superseded earlier scientific paradigms:
the Ptolemaic system;
Copernicanism;
Galilean relativity;
the electromagnetic theory;
Einsteinian relativity -
- Wald's Dirac communicator, by receiving messages from many future periods, discloses an even greater number of mutually incompatible paradigms while his metalanguage shows that the structure of science makes it impossible to choose between such paradigms because that structure is one of the paradigms.
I thought that science was not a paradigm but the process of either creating or accepting, then applying, a paradigm. But, in any case, both Anderson and Blish dramatize scientists communicating future discoveries by creating new symbolisms, mathematical or linguistic.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think scientific paradigms arise from the efforts made to understand what the data obtained from observation and experiment tells those scientists. With the quantum mechanics discussed by Frank Tipler and Sean Carroll being on the cutting edge of physics and cosmology. With the theories developed in attempts to make sense of that data overthrowing past paradigms. As quantum mechanics has done to classical Newtonian physics.
Ad astra! Sean
It's important not to fall into Kuhn-ism. In point of fact, breakthrough periods in the sciences have generally met little resistance, because by the time they happen most scientists are aware that the previous explanatory framework is incomplete -- and this has become more so with each subsequence scientific transition period, as science moves further away from theology.
Eg., relativistic physics was greeted with immediate interest as soon as Einstein began publishing, because the neoclassical synthesis of the mid-19th century had been showing serious cracks since the 1880's, and all physicists knew it. By the time it had been experimentally validated in the early 1920's, it had pretty much swept the board. Quantum mechanics followed shortly.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Certainly, I agree with most of what you said here. I would add, however, that Sean Carroll discussed in his book SOMETHING DEEPLY HIDDEN that not all physicists were happy about the implications and consequences of quantum physics and mechanics. Esp. dead serious suggestions about alternate or parallel universes. There was resistance, for example, to the work of Hugh Everett.
Anderson's THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS was, I think, the very first time I came across that idea of parallel universes, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I note esp. the framing device of that fictional "Introduction" where that idea was discussed.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment