Observation continued

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Observation continued

• Kuhn Why what scientists observe changes after a
  revolution
• Behind the Hubbles images
• The Social Brain
• Our next of kin and language (film)

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Observation

• Important days in the history of the universe
  (cnn.com)
• July 4, 1054 The day the sky got brighter
• An exploding star in the constellation Taurus
• Recorded by the Chinese and the Anasazi Indians
  of North America but not by Europeans!
• (Some really big things (comets)
• taken to be divine signs)
• Now known as the Crab Nebula

3
Observation

• Important days in the history of the universe
  (cnn.com)
• March 12, 1610 Day Galileo revealed all his
  secrets

4
Kuhn Observation and scientific revolutions

• Recall Kuhns account of the nature and role of
  paradigms
• They carry quasi-metaphysical commitments about
  what the world or universe of a particular
  science contains and does not
• In normal science, scientists are concerned to
  fit nature into the boxes a paradigm supplies
• They are not seeking novelty and not challenging
  the paradigm that determines the research agenda
  in their field.

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Observation and scientific revolutions

• But when a scientific revolution in Kuhns
  words a paradigm shift occurs it has an
  impact on observations as well as on theories.
• According to Kuhn, the old and the new
  paradigms are incompatible
• Parallels between a scientific revolution and a
  political revolution
• There is no third party or higher authority
  that prevails. Only the consent of the relevant
  community counts.

6
Observation and scientific revolutions

• There is no third party or higher authority
  that prevails. Only the consent of the relevant
  community counts.
• Why is this the case?
• In both political and scientific revolutions, the
  new order seeks to change things in ways that the
  older order prohibits.
• So in each case, one must abandon a whole set of
  institutions to make the change.

7
Observation and scientific revolutions

• Paradigms and observations (or paradigms and what
  exists)
• Examining the record of past research the
  historian of science may be tempted to exclaim
  that when paradigms change, the world itself
  changes with them
• Scientists adopt new instruments and look in new
  places.
• Scientists see new and different things when
  looking with familiar instruments in places they
  have looked before.

8
Observation and scientific revolutions

• Paradigms and observations (or paradigms and what
  exists)
• There is a transformation in vision
• And insofar as scientists only recourse to the
  world of their research-engagement is through
  what they see and do, we may want to say that
  after a revolution, scientists are responding to
  a different world.

9
Observation and scientific revolutions

• How these changes in observation are like, and
  how they are unlike, the experiences of subjects
  in gestalt experiments
• Like subjects in a gestalt experiment, what they
  observe in the end is far different from what
  they initially observed.
• But there is no third party, authority figure
  like the experimenter who designed the gestalt
  experiment, to explain the change in vision in a
  scientific community.
• There is only the consensus within the community.

10
Observation

• Important days in the history of the universe
• Dec. 30, 1924 The day the universe got bigger
• Using a new telescope, Edwin Hubble made 2 major
  discoveries
• There are galaxies other than our own! We now
  know there are more than 100 billion galaxies
• Galaxies are, on average, moving away from us

11
Observation

• Important days in the history of the universe
• May 13, 1965 the day we heard The Big Bang
• Two young radio astronomers stumbled across its
  afterglow
• Discovered a source of irremovable static in a
  sensitive microwave antenna
• It was the microwave background of radiation that
  exists as a remnant of The Big Bang

12
Observation

• March 2008 issue of Scientific American
• Cover story The End of Cosmology
• Evidence of the Big Bang is disappearing as the
  universe expands.
• The accelerating cosmic expansion is wiping away
  every trace of the universes origin.

13
Observations made by The Hubble Telescope

• We should rather speak of The Hubble System, of
  which the telescope and its parts (cameras and
  other features) are only a part
• We should also note that the Hubble does not work
  by magnifying images, but by being able to take
  in great amounts of light
• And we should note that the Hubble does not
  include cameras in the normal sense but light
  collectors .. And so does not itself produce the
  images NASA presents.

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Why the shape?
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From whence the colors?
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The Social Brain EEG MEG
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Our next of kin and languageWashoe and sign
language
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Washoe using sign language with Roger
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Kanzi (a Bonobo) using a lexigramto speak to
Sue