Thanks Paul, always an enjoyable quality read, in a world exploding with information.... Now to the thought this article prompts.... If we don’t self-terminate (seemingly quite probable now) and we stretch out the element of surprise 1,000 years (and assume exponential scientific progresses) it would seem likely that all our current views will either have been proved to be either just limited pictures in larger contexts of new understandings (thus being at best only partly right in limited domains), or even actually false, being disproven by later more elegant falsification processes. Thus from this anticipatory millennial perspective we should be not just humble about what we know, but realise that it’s highly likely all just tentative working theories.
I think that's exactly right. If I were to choose one scientific idea that I am confident will stand the test of time then it would be the theory of evolution by natural selection. But even in the 150 years since that theory was first proposed, our understanding of it has already deepened so much, especially through the synthesis with genetics, that while the fundamental idea stands up, it would have been naive for a contemporary of Darwin to believe that their knowledge was more than an incomplete picture. So certainly I think you are right that we should imagine that if we were to see 1000 years into the future, we would find that none of our existing knowledge could be considered the final word in any area.
This article is gold! :D
Thanks Paul, always an enjoyable quality read, in a world exploding with information.... Now to the thought this article prompts.... If we don’t self-terminate (seemingly quite probable now) and we stretch out the element of surprise 1,000 years (and assume exponential scientific progresses) it would seem likely that all our current views will either have been proved to be either just limited pictures in larger contexts of new understandings (thus being at best only partly right in limited domains), or even actually false, being disproven by later more elegant falsification processes. Thus from this anticipatory millennial perspective we should be not just humble about what we know, but realise that it’s highly likely all just tentative working theories.
I think that's exactly right. If I were to choose one scientific idea that I am confident will stand the test of time then it would be the theory of evolution by natural selection. But even in the 150 years since that theory was first proposed, our understanding of it has already deepened so much, especially through the synthesis with genetics, that while the fundamental idea stands up, it would have been naive for a contemporary of Darwin to believe that their knowledge was more than an incomplete picture. So certainly I think you are right that we should imagine that if we were to see 1000 years into the future, we would find that none of our existing knowledge could be considered the final word in any area.