Paradigm Shifts

1.)A Paradigm Shift in the end, it is the definition of an educated person that has to change. The de facto objectives of the system today are to pour knowledge into the child. The more knowledge the child accumulates, the more successful they are within the system. Education remains linear in a decidedly non-linear world. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and fathered, defined and popularized the concept of "paradigm shift" .Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions", and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another". Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change. There are many instances throughout history where there have been paradigm shifts in science: the Ptolemean / Copernican shift, Newtonian / Einsteinian shift, and so on. I will reflect on one, put forth as an example by Kuhn (1996), for major paradigm shifts in science. The one that I will discuss is Newton's Principia and the occult qua

Before Newton's discovery, the scientists of the time had dispelled the belief that items had innate properties other than the directly observable ones; color, taste, and even smell were secondary properties which could be explained in terms of size, shape, position and motion of elementary corpuscles. While used for similar things, fractals and chaos are still very different. The fractal dimensions of Pollock's earlier drip paintings, Taylor concluded, correspond closely to those found in nature. This was the mechanico-corpuscular view of the world. The classic example of chaos theory involves a butterfly. The small sound created startles an elephant, which then causes the entire herd to stampede. (Pollock moved away from drip painting in 1953. A Pollock painting, one critic complained, is like "a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out. Others said that a trained chimpanzee could do just as well. The result was a reversion to a scholastic standard of innate qualities2. If a hurricane is a chaotic system, then the wreckage made in its path is its fractal pattern. Chaos, as this young science is called, deals with predictability in complex systems, systems such as Earth's sometimes turbulent weather patterns - and although it is still a fledgling science, it has already made remarkable headway towards solving some of Nature's most baffling puzzles. In short, the two definitions overlap quite a bit, but aren't synonymous by any definition. Deterministic chaos, as opposed to just chaos, implies that a specific chaotic system is being used to model a phenomenon.