Observation continued  Kuhn: Why what scientists observe changes after a revolution  “Behind” the Hubble’s images  The Social Brain  Our “next of kin” and language (film)

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) (Some really big things (comets) taken to be “divine signs”) taken to be “divine signs”)  Now known as the Crab Nebula

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

Kuhn: Observation and scientific revolutions  Recall Kuhn’s 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.

Observation and scientific revolutions  But when a scientific revolution – in Kuhn’s 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 universe’s origin.

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.

Why the shape?

From whence the colors?

The Social Brain EEGMEG

Our next of kin and language: Washoe and sign language

Washoe using sign language with Roger

Kanzi (a Bonobo) using a lexigram to “speak” to Sue