Just as the ancients had struggled to come to terms with the apparently flat earth being a sphere hanging in empty space, our intuitions can rebel against the picture of reality revealed by the new physics. The deeper insights revealed by the new physics jarred with many of humanity’s deepest intuitions. It simply cast light on things we had not known before, revealing long-hidden mysteries that we could not have guessed using intuition alone. But it is important to remember that the ‘new’ physics of the 20 th Century did not change the actual nature of reality. It was as though our home – the universe we had lived in for so long – had been radically remodelled, leaving us contemplating these changes in bewilderment. “ That light should bend or that the universe began in a minuscule primeval singularity and is expanding, that atoms could be split or nuclear bombs built, even that heavy metal objects should fly or men land on the moon, even (going back to Copernicus) that the earth revolves around the sun – all of these would have been dismissed as absurd according to the intuition and commonsense of earlier generations.” 1 They had to wrestle with the mind bending picture of the universe that was being unveiled as the horizons of knowledge were pulled back: The physicists of the early 20 th Century were presented with a universe very alien to the intuitive ‘clockwork’ system described by Newton, Galileo et al. However, making headway in the new physics required its pioneers to be willing to accept an extraordinary new vision of reality. In short, it required a paradigm shift – it asked that we release an old and familiar explanatory framework in order to grasp a new and more powerful one. However, the unlocking of this potential required a wholesale reassessment of how we had previously come to understand reality. The new physics brought with it striking new powers to explain and predict the phenomena of the physical universe, unleashing a wave of cosmological discovery and technological innovation. special relativity and quantum mechanics), new foundations for understanding physical reality had to be established.
In the leap from Newton’s physics to the ‘new’ physics of Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg et al. But sometimes the very foundations used to turn information to understanding need to be radically rethought. We use prior knowledge, trusted methods and accepted assumptions to place a new layer of understanding on the layer before. In general, the sciences inch forward gradually on shared foundations. In the natural sciences, only a handful of true paradigm shifts have ever occurred. A paradigm shift does not primarily change our understanding of a given piece of information, but goes much deeper, changing our approach to how all things fit together, including the process of understanding itself. This kind of move has been called a paradigm shift, a radical reshaping of the way we see and explain reality. Like a person jumping from one stepping stone to another, we may have to leave the safety of one explanatory framework to land both our feet safely on another one.
This may mean questioning long-held norms, definitions and connections. To make fullest sense of what is out there, it may be necessary to change our conceptual framework – to revisit how we make sense of the facts of life. In such a case, the sense can arise that maybe we don’t just need more information, we need a different way to link and interpret all information In the face of new information, old explanatory connections can become increasingly strained.
Yet, once in a while, a person may be compelled to make a significant leap in the way they see the world. Most people are naturally wary, changing their opinions of people and things only gradually. This is as true of our personal relationships as it is of our approach to the physical world. We build slowly on what we know, using methods we have reasons to trust. The way we understand reality usually develops incrementally.