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THE EVOLUTION OF 

SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 

by

Burnard Morey BSc DCH FAIM FRACI

© Burnard Morey 2001,2,3,4,5  

 

Eight Lectures On The Evolution of Scientific Thought 

From Stonehenge (3000BC) to the 21st Century.         Attempting to understand the strange, bizarre,                       yet wonderful and fascinating universe we live in. 

The lectures are designed to be both educational and challenging

 Introduction             A Preliminary Thought – The Fundamentals 

Lecture 1 :  Beginnings – what is science & what is truth? The Babylonians, Greeks, Egyptians,   Hermeticism & Alexandria. The Arabs.  Time keeping:  The Calendar & clocks. 

Lecture 2 :  The Language of Science –  Mathematics.   The Babylonian contribution -60                       Archimedes.  The Arabs & Algebra . Calculating – the abacus and Archimedes -   Zero, Infinity, the Calculus, Logarithms, Pi 

Lecture 3 :    The Dark Ages –   Alphabet, writing & printing –   papyrus, parchment, paper.  The Astrologers.  The Alchemists.  The Black Death – science on the back burner -  Paracelsus, Newton, The Royal Society 

Lecture 4 :   The Renaissance –   Da Vinci.      Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler – the universe debate.       Science and the Church in conflict.  The Enlightenment.  Descartes & Rationalism.  Getting real – The changing attitude to reality                    

 Lecture 5  :    The Age of Enlightenment - A  Superstitious Age.  Intuition & scientific discovery.     Transformation of the world picture. The driving forces behind the evolution of Scientific Thought 

Lecture 6 :   Getting Modern – Darwin & Evolution.  Evolution in the light of Bohm's interpretation of Quantum Theory.  What is Matter? Democritus to Dalton to Rutherford to Bohr.  Atoms, Rays, Particles, and Energy .  Hoyle and Stardust.

Lecture 7 :   Radical Intuitive Theories –  Einstein & Relativity – Spacetime – Gravity – Black Holes. Planck & Quantum Mechanics. Matter , Mind & Consciousness –  Werner Heisenberg & David Bohm  

Lecture 8 :    Unravelling the Universe –  Creation ex nihilo?  The end of Orthodoxy – a new interpretation of God. The Big Bang:  or alternative theories - Hoyle's Steady State Universe -  the plasma universe of Hannes Alfvιn -  David Bohm's multidimensional conscious universe.  The Red Shift - is the universe expanding or rotating?  Stars, Galaxies, and Space. The last word - Carl Sagan 

 

The Evolution of Scientific Thought

 Foreword 

These lectures are a brief non-technical exploration of the evolution of man’s thinking about the universe and the world around us, from Stonehenge until the end of the twentieth century. It formed the basis of a series of lectures to The University of the Third Age in Perth, Western Australia, in 2001, and again in 2002, and again in 2003. You will meet many of the key players in this great saga, and the controversies that surrounded their discoveries and ideas. It helps us appreciate what a weird and wonderful world we live in, where, despite all our knowledge, we seem no nearer to solving the riddle of the universe – just a little more mystified.  

An Introductory Thought 

The more we speculate, and think scientifically, and the more we discover, the more we realise that we live in a very weird and bizarre World or Universe; which Einstein referred to as, ‘this strange world’. It surprises many scientists that we are able to understand it at all, and they see this as a very significant fact. It implies that mind, or consciousness, and physical reality, are somehow inter-related at the most fundamental level, as some interpretations of the Quantum Theory suggest. 

I suspect that at the most profound depths of reality it is not strange, weird, or bizarre at all, just very simple. Let me use music as an analogy. 

When you listen to a Beethoven Symphony, for example, the sound or harmony is extremely complex. It is a combination of the individual sounds of each instrument, which in turn have their own characteristic sounds: violins, cellos, basses, flutes, oboes, clarinets, trumpets, drums & symbols, even human voices.  

But each of these individual characteristic sounds is built up from what are called fundamentals – simple harmonic notes of different frequencies stretching on either side of what we have called middle C, which has a frequency of 256 vibrations per second. As these fundamentals are played together their waveforms interact and create harmonics and beats, such as chords, where you do not hear the individual notes but a composite sound – either pleasantly harmonious or discordant, which is a subjective judgement. And these in turn interact to create the even more complex harmonies or discords, which Beethoven weaves into his symphony. What you hear is nothing like the fundamental sounds from which all this grew, in fact, you may find it difficult to appreciate that such simple sounds, or waves of energy, evolved and ended up as a Beethoven symphony. 

As human beings, we are no different. Our highly convoluted harmonious or discordant natures and personalities also are built up from the interactions and evolution of all our simple memories of learning, sensory experience, and thinking, making each of us as individual and as complex as that Beethoven Symphony. We evolve individually in much the same way that all of creation evolves. 

So I feel it is the same with the universe – a very profound but simple series of fundamentals, energy waves (electro-magnetic in this case), which through evolution over an infinity of time have woven themselves into the weird and bizarre universe in which we find ourselves living today. It is like the complex musical symphony; we only hear and see the final harmonies and discords, and not the simple fundamental depths from which it all evolved. In fact, these harmonies and discords are still evolving, and will continue to do so through an infinity of time, because we live in a continually creative and creating universe. Many, maybe most, of these evolutionary changes remain hidden from us because, not only are they spread over enormous eons of time, but also because of our personally limited vision and perception; our blinkered and biased view and interpretation of reality. Even the Composer of this infinite symphony is invisible to our limited perception and understanding. What we see and hear and experience shows no similarity to the simplicity out of which it is all formed. We’ll glimpse that weirdness later when we consider the implications of the more recent thinking of scientists.

 

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