Throughout history, our predecessors in science and philosophy have been convinced that their particular understanding of reality was, at least largely, correct. Yet time and again, subsequent generations have proven—or at least were convinced of having proven—them wrong. Each generation has looked upon the ideas of their predecessors as naïve, simplistic, even superstitious.
During the Renaissance, scientists attempted to explain electrostatic attraction by postulating the existence of an invisible elastic substance—called ‘effluvium’—that supposedly stretched out across bodies. Strange as it may sound now, at the time effluvium was as plausible an explanation for empirical observations as subatomic particles today, which are equally invisible beyond the effects they putatively produce.
As the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, scientists began trying to frame every phenomenon in terms of the action of small corpuscles—atoms—interacting with each other through direct contact. Any explanation that failed to conform to this template was considered an appeal to magic and therefore implausible, to say the least. This is why the ideas of an English scientist called Isaac Newton were ignored and even ridiculed for decades; Newton dared to propose that objects attracted one another from a distance by virtue of an invisible, mysterious force he called ‘gravity’. We know how that story developed.
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