So that’s it then? When new evidence results in a paradigm shift
By Evelyn and Elena. Year 9
At the first Year 9 Academic Scholars’ meeting of the year, Mr Cavendish introduced us to a new topic we will be exploring during the next few meetings: theories we thought we nailed but hadn’t.
Take, for instance, the Principle of Superposition, proposed in 1669 by Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno and championed in the 19th century by the celebrated Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Murchison. Based on his studies of rocks in the northwest highlands, Murchison believed that in a sequence of sedimentary rock, the oldest layers had to be at the bottom and the youngest at the top. Many years after Murchison’s death, however, new evidence came to light that challenged the straightforward application of this principle. By the 1960s, most geologists accepted that the forces resulting from plate tectonics could result in folded strata, faulting and intrusions that might disrupt or even reverse the sequence of strata. This resulted in a paradigm shift, a concept proposed by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, which describes a fundamental change in the basic concepts and practices of a scientific discipline. The Principle of Superposition was not abandoned but refined: it applies only to undisturbed rock.
Looking at another example of a paradigm shift, we considered Sir Isaac Newton, 17th century physicist celebrated for his work on the motion of large objects and gravity. In June 1925, however, 23-year-old German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to the island of Heligoland to recover from an illness and began developing ideas that would become the foundations of quantum mechanics. At the atomic scale, Newton’s laws alone could not explain phenomena Heisenberg observed, and his work helped establish a new framework for understanding nature. Ultimately, this development expanded rather than replaced Newtonian physics and gave us a fundamentally new way of seeing the world, leading eventually to technologies such as quantum computers.
These examples reveal how new evidence can challenge old assumptions, refine theories and deepen our understanding of the universe.
