Afterwards we quite often see how revolutionary some ideas or ways of thinking have been ..

Scientists discover still new stuff on a daily bases. What they exactly discovered is not always clear rightaway …

I have so many revolutionary ideas .. but hey .. I dont need to be credited for them .. I’ll just wait till scientists go work on them (and they do, quite often). Aint that nice.

“Of course science doesn’t know everything. It *knows* it doesn’t know everything. If it did, it’d stop!”

Brilliant.

Freud was full of grand theories – and has now been almost entirely discredited due to a lack of empirical support. However if he had been able to utilise modern methodologies to quantify his ideas, they could have been honed using feedback from any data collected and may still have some credence. Pioneers Eysenck, Pavlov (nobel prize winner), Galton and Skinner were all ‘thinkers’ too, however they maintained an effective methodolgy to support what they believed.

We will always use our imagination to gear scientific discovery – the methodologies ensure we stay in the realms of reality and truth but the inspiration of what to look for and where will always be instrinsic and idiosyncratic. Scientists are people too!

Internal ideas first – external methodology second.

Back in the day, we had Newton’s mechanics and theory of Gravity to explain how everything moved and Maxwell’s Electromagnetic theory, unifying the forces of electricity and magnetism and explaining not only these forces but also the nature of light (and other electromagnetic radiation). Physics had come as far as it could and we knew everything there was to know about how the ‘universe’ worked. Future physics, they thought, was just a matter of improving accuracy.

Then came Einstein, first changing the basic notion of space and time and how movement shows the two to be part of the same ‘spacetime’. Then he showed how the force of gravity is actually the bending of this spacetime. Then came the Quantum theory, completely changing the way we viewed the subatomic world. Then Edwin Hubble provided evidence that our Galaxy wasn’t all there was and that it was just a speck in a much bigger picture, leading eventually to Big Bang theory. After that came the varied world of particle physics, and incredible theories such as Feynmann’s Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Of course, nowadays serious physicists talks about Many Worlds, alternative realities, String theory, multiple dimensions, what happened before the Big Bang, M-theory and our place in the Multiverse, etc. Who’s to tell what is another 100 years up the road?

I think the key thing to remember is this: Being scientific is more than just applying scientific method or current scientific knowledge. Being scientific is also about being open-minded as to what we don’t currently see or know. That was the great contribution of the “outstanding individuals” mentioned in the article (Darwin, Einstein, etc.), whereas those scienticists who are blinkered by what they know now write articles about how science has gone as far as it can, just as they did in the 1880s.

Come on. We can do better than that!

Scientific revolution comes with depth of understanding and also breadth of understanding. Imagine if mainstream society eventually adopts scientific thinking into their everyday life. Derren, Dawkins and others alike work to make the connection of science to mainstream. We should congratulate these people and aspire to contribute to this promotion of science. If we are aware of it and can enrich our lives because of it, then we have a responsibility to those who are unaware.

Once the message gets through to the whole world (don’t hold your breath, but I will happen – we’ll evolve to it) then we’ll have a world where the entire crowd is individually wise. Only then will something greater come. Only then will the unimagineable revolution occur.

Science hasn’t even begun.

We still need to research why the problems in the world exist today. Emotional intellegence and how it really works is probably a good step to take.