The way science has progressed has been the subject of many theories. Thomas Kuhn has popularized the concept of paradigm. In a scientific field, a paradigm is a set of concepts that more or less fit the mass of experimental data with some models and theories. The whole set tends to preserve itself from accidents which happen in new experimental facts and new theories that can happen now and then. It takes what Thomas Kuhn calls a scientific revolution (overwhelming evidence in theory and/or experiments) to shift from one paradigm to another.
Karl Popper has also questioned what can be called scientific. His concept of refutability is now part of the criteria to select which academic sector can be called scientific (think creationism, psychoanalysis, homeopathy).
On the other hand, Martin Harwit has shown how scientific discoveries have often been obtained simultaneously and by independent people. For example, we can cite Darwin and Wallace, or Einstein and Poincaré, as clear examples that they were onto big discoveries independently. Nobel Prizes often have several independent discoverers of the same new scientific fact. For example, the Higgs mechanism has been found at least twice separately. The periodic table of elements was theorized many times, until it stabilized with Mendeleev: his model was superior to the others because it was predictive of new elements that were eventually discovered.
Here, we think that ideas emerge in some environment. They are basically generated at random, in the brain of various people. Then they are tested within the world environment with experiments: General Relativity had to explain the whole corpus of the gravitation science set by Newton, and it could explain even more (the precession of Mercury perihelion). Then it made the prediction that matter can bend light, and Eddington measured that during a famous solar eclipse.
Science advances by testing hypotheses with a specific method: ideas can lead to predictions in some experimental setup. These tests can be done everywhere and at any time. They can be repeated by anybody. Science is the corpus of ideas which have been tested against experiments with a strict methodology, with repeatability, falsifiability, refutability, and predictivity. Karl Popper has insisted that scientific ideas cannot be proven. Instead, they must contain a way to show how they could be refuted. Experiments must exist that probe the ideas. Otherwise, the ideas are deemed outside the scope of science. This is why science has split from other old disciplines like theology and philosophy.
In any case, we see how Darwinian evolution is at work in the scientific process. The experiment method sifts through all ideas. Ideas which pass the tests get selected and retained.
They are then transmitted to the younger generation of scientists and are assimilated by the public, in the long run. The advance of science has been much faster once the corpus of science could be written and transmitted easily.
| This figure shows how new objects were rediscovered in the field of Astronomy (Martin Harwit) |
