Courses
This course studies two revolutions in scientific thought – the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the computational revolution of the twentieth century. The Scientific Revolution gave scientists optimism that, in principle, they could understand everything about the world around them. In contrast, the revolutions in complexity, logic, computation, mathematics, and physics of the twentieth century put fundamental limits on what scientists could know and understand. Taught abroad, this course explores the natural connections between the history of science and scientific sites, including local museums, observatories, universities, laboratories, and archaeological sites. This material is contrasted with key results from chaos theory, computational complexity, logic, physics, quantum mechanics, and the theory of computation, all developed in the twentieth century.
This course is designed as a parallel track to GE 1210: Scientific Revolutions Abroad. Together, these courses examine revolutions in scientific thought through the lens of both history of science and philosophy of science. In this course, we explore the ways in which scientific revolutions impacted core themes in philosophy of science, including debates about how to define science and how to characterize scientific inference, explanation, theory change, and understanding of evidence. We seek to answer important questions in philosophy of science including “How do scientific theories change over time?”, “What are the limits of scientific explanation?”, “What makes a theory scientific?” and “How does culture influence scientific reasoning and scientific practice?”
In the past 500 years, there have been two major revolutions in scientific thought. Newton’s discovery of the universal law of gravitation was the climax of the Scientific Revolution, which swept across England and all of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was during this period that a dramatically different approach to creating knowledge based on experimentation and precise mathematical models was developed. The Scientific Revolution gave scientists the optimism that, in principle, they could understand everything about the world around them. However, researchers in the 20th century discovered four conceptual challenges that put fundamental limits on what scientists can know: Lorenz demonstrated that the behavior of chaotic systems cannot be predicted accurately, Cook and Turing showed that certain problems cannot be solved, Godel found limits on our ability to determine which statements are true, and Einstein and Heisenberg derived fundamental restrictions on what scientists can know. Taken together, these ideas made a powerful and overarching statement about the limits of human knowledge that has profoundly affected disciplines as diverse as biology, philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, computer engineering, and religion.
