 Okay, we hit 10, at least by my clock. Oh, yep, we sure did. Okay. Thank you. I was kind of spaced out there. See, I know I'm gonna, all right. Can everyone hear me? Welcome. I'm not sure if I, all right. I just can get a little confirmation that people can hear my voice. One, two, three, four, five. Okay, thank you. All right, thank you very much. Okay, very good. All right, well, welcome everyone to the ongoing series of panel discussions hosted by the Science Circle. Thanks to Chantal and all of her people to help bring this together for us. I want to remind everyone that the Science Circle is a grant funded non-profit organization dedicated to the development of virtual world platforms for education. So I'll ask you all to be on your best behavior, please so we can keep our grant funding. And also we're trying a little bit of experimental system this time using Zoom Voice, which is patched into SL for voice. This is kind of an anti-griefing measure. So hopefully this will work okay for everyone. And keep your, please keep your microphones in Second Life off. If you want to make any comments, please type them into nearby chat. I will try to be sort of monitoring that and can relay your comments in voice as needed. And with that sort of introductory remarks, let me tell you a little bit about what we're going to be talking about today. One of our speakers is arriving late. I'm going to go ahead and give you a little background about him in the hopes that he will arrive during the middle of our discussion and can participate. So one of our speakers will hopefully be Giuseppe Longo who spent 20 years as an astronomer at the Observatorio Astronomico di Capo di Monte, the INAF in Italy. In 2001, he became an associate professor and in 2006, a full professor of astrophysics at the University of Napoli Federico II. Giuseppe is also a technology associate to the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Italian Institute of Astrophysics and a member of the Academia Pontaniana, the oldest Italian Academy established in 1434. His main research interests, let's see did I mention that he's at Caltech now too, yeah, I see that he's at Caltech now too. His main research interests are in the emerging field of astroinformatics and in particular in the application of modern computer science technologies to the analysis and interpretation of astrophysical data. Our other guest today is Stephen Gager who is to be familiar to science circle students. He's currently a scientist at Corteva Agris Sciences. His education and research is in molecular biology. He earned a PhD in molecular biology and cell biology from the University of Chicago and also did post-docs work at University of Chicago and Tulane where he investigated DNA repair mechanisms at University of New Orleans and then also Ball State. He developed educational activities in Second Life and in Open Simulator. And Stephen currently develops and advances genome editing technologies in corn seed for the seed company, Corteva Agris Sciences. And so those are our panelists today and I'm your humble host, Matthew Burr, also Baragon Betts in Second Life. We are today going to talk about the structure of scientific revolutions and this topic is prompted by Thomas Kuhn who was an American philosopher of science whose book in 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles. Introducing the term paradigm shift which has since become an English language idiom, Kuhn argues that science proceeds in extended periods of quote unquote normal science which is periodically punctuated by a radical shift in thinking as a result of the accumulation of data or the observation of anomalies and so forth. He used the Copernican Revolution as an example of this phenomenon. Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a melange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addresses his concerns in 1969 post-script of his book, The Second Edition. For some commentators, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced a realistic humanism into the core of science while for others the nobility of science was tarnished by Kuhn's introduction of an irrational element into the heart of its greatest achievements. Notable critics include the philosopher Carl Popper and also Paul Firebend. Nevertheless, the term paradigm shift has entered the popular vernacular and the concept has been evaluated if not fully embraced in a wide variety of fields. So Steven and Giuseppe are joining me today to explore the meaning and scope of scientific paradigm shifts. And with that introduction, I will now turn the microphone over to Steven who has a presentation on the slide screen behind us and Steven, take it away. Thank you, Matt. And thank you for the introduction. Thanks everyone for coming today to talk a little bit more about kind of the way we think about science as compared to an actual hard science topic. But I think it's one that as Berrigan mentioned is important in terms of the public conception of science as well as scientists, I think in some cases being more aware of the history of science to help them really communicate science and to really understand the context of new discoveries. So let me just introduce first the book. And like Berrigan said, this came out in 1962 again, published by U of Chicago Press again, my graduate alma mater. And it really was kind of this first attempt for someone to incorporate, I think like the best way of understanding how science has progressed. And so in the context of Coon at the time, and he mentions this, that a lot of people thought science at that time was, well, we just keep accumulating knowledge and we keep modifying developing our theories and then that works. And most scientists bought into that. And what became very clear is that in some cases just trying to do that process of accumulating more knowledge actually became very hard for people to explain that they were doing something and it really just didn't make sense to them. And so what Coon did was to reformulate the idea into this term, the paradigm and to have these revolutions that come from the scientific process that even scientists were not kind of aware of how that process was occurring. So since that time, this really has been adopted as kind of the way we think about historical science. And what I really wanted to bring to the table today is not just a discussion of this historically but I also think, and this is just again my own philosophizing, that at least in the field of biology and almost every field, at some point you're gonna get into a post Coonian phase of science that where the philosophy he espoused while might still be true in minor ways for different fields of science that in fact, there's a point at which and I can give you the criteria for why I think that will be by the end that Coonian science and the scientific revolutions is done. And so we'll talk about that a little bit in the end. And so let's go through this basic structure of what he describes. And let me just mention that my background is very much as an microbiologist and it was in that space of my career where I was teaching at Ball State University I was given the opportunity to teach in honors biology class. Now this was an honors class specifically for non biology majors. And so I had to make it interesting for them. And what I thought would be interesting was trying to give them an appreciation of the process of science because even most scientists don't necessarily learn process of science. And there are a lot of times where someone says, oh, how come science changes its mind or whatever or how come science was wrong? And I think those are the types of objections to science or things you hear in the media that if you knew how science worked if you understood the process of science you wouldn't even say that in the first place. So I think that was kind of my purpose and goal for doing this. But let's talk about the basic structure that Coon proposed. And I have this kind of as a three Roman numeral breakdown with a bit of a beginning part which is pre-science. Pre-science was when people basically anytime before let's say 1700s maybe the Sir Francis Bacon era of time that people just kind of made stuff up. They looked at things like Aristotle or even a lot of great Arabic scientists that they observed science and tried to make sense of it. And then they came up with a theory for how it works. And then as things became more formalized and what Coon describes so people started developing paradigms and that is some sort of overarching theory that explains the phenomenon you see in some field. And then what people do in that field and that within that paradigm is they do experiments in science that helps explain the paradigm. And in fact, most of their experiments is trying to conform to the paradigm. And that's where people just keep going that in many ways those are very non creatively of thinking about it. But Coon also describes in this normal science of people trying to push the levels of trying to say what is something different or can I explore some strange phenomenon that I don't understand and try and explain it within that. So what Coon describes invariably happening for any paradigm that's not a full and accurate description is an anomaly that there's some experiment that you cannot use the overarching theory to explain why it works that way. And I'll give a couple of examples for that. And then what happens is once this anomaly becomes known and well-spread then there's this crisis and the scientific community questions what's going on they're like, how is this right? Or they accuse the person who did the experiment of not doing it right or maybe finding different ways to approach the same question. And so, but over time enough people applying this new way of thinking, trying to explain anomaly they come up with a new paradigm and that's the third part. And a part of the key about that new paradigm is it's not just that you have this new idea it's that it has value that basically it's value explains as much as it can that you're observing and it has to be useful, be a broad scope theory, et cetera. And so, I think what Coon also describes of course is that any new paradigm is still just describing probably a subset of the phenomenon you're looking at. And that is eventually that becomes the new paradigm people believe it, people learn it from textbooks, people base again that next round of normal science on it and then eventually another anomaly comes up and then you repeat as necessary. So, let me go to the examples because what Coon really was describing was thinking about very large fields of what was chemistry, what was physics? What was biology? And so, the first one, which again, let me say at the bottom here, I have a citation of the invention of air which was a book by Steven Johnson and Steven Johnson is great, he's probably my favorite science writer. If you wanna get a really good background on this by that book. But in essence, what chemistry had in terms of understanding combustion and understanding what just the concept of air was, right? People didn't even think of air as if the air was just around, there wasn't an air. But there was this phlogiston theory for how combustion works and phlogiston is kind of derived actually from Aristotle's four humors, four elements idea that things contain a combustible chemical, a combustible element, which is in many ways very much an alchemy type of way of thinking too. And that when something burned, that got used up and then went into the atmosphere. And so, one thing that people observed is that if you were burning a candle and you had a mouse in a box, that mouse died from the candle. So it made sense that somehow something was being released that could kill the mouse. But the anomaly in this case, the one that was found by Joseph Priestly was that when he put a plant inside a box with a burning candle, the candle kept burning. And so that's a really good example of an anomaly where it just doesn't make any sense. Again, Barry gonna ask in the local chat, what do they think wind was? Answers I don't know. Yeah, a lot of mice died, I guess, in these experiments, but that's kind of a lot of life from mice in the scientific community. Good point though, tagline. But I will say, so this anomaly could not be explained by phlogiston theory. The other thing that was occurring at the time was that again, if you have something that's burning and then it's releasing phlogiston particles or whatever, it should decrease in weight. And what people were knowing is that observing was that if you burned metal, the metal actually gained weight or some of the stuff that came off of the compound weighed heavier than the original thing that was burned. And so this also again, this anomaly cannot be explained by phlogiston theory. And so then there was a crisis. And this is where again, you need to buy into the community, communicate the results, people worked on it. And eventually, Lavoisier published chemistry, which was kind of the best explanation at the time of what is oxidation. And so this became the idea that the air, this atmosphere, what we now call the atmosphere has different elements in it. There are not just different elements, but there are different compounds that are derived from those elements, really became kind of the beginning of chemistry. And I was that a full explanation of oxidation combustion chemistry? No, but it did a very good job of explaining this phenomenon. And then the other one that Kuhn did not discuss, but I'm gonna discuss, because again, I can cite another Steven Johnson book, which was really good explaining it, is the ghost map talking about a John Snow investigating cholera in 1854 London, that people used to believe disease was spread by the air, that miasma and bad vapors. So if you are familiar with the plague doctors, they have those big things with the beaks, what they were actually doing with those stuffing perfumes in them to protect them from disease, because they were the doctors trying to help people. And so that was the belief, was that bad vapors air? Again, it's kind of derived in a couple of derivations from aerosodals for humors, for elements type of idea. Now what John Snow did was he investigated this, both the Broad Street pump, as well as looking at the statistics of sewage off the tames and water supplies, and said, air cannot explain why people get sick. And he actually had a very good explanation, he could say it was carried by water, because there was this Broad Street pump, these things that, oh, actually Nexus, thanks for pointing that out. He mentions that the term malaria actually come from the idea of bad air. Now malaria we now know is spread by mosquitoes. So again, do fly through the air, and that makes kind of sense. But that's a type of, that's a really good example of what people really believed was a spread of disease. So then the crisis, again, came about of people trying to understand how disease spread, there was contagion theory, there were people trying to work on these things. And so ultimately there was enough investigation where you think about Robert Koch, Lister, again, Louis Pasteur, something everyone knows Louis Pasteur, showing how you get germ theory out of all that work. And so again, we now have a new theory about how disease works. Now is germ theory the entire thing for how we understand disease? Well, the answer is no. Of course, we now know there are viruses, we now know there are prions. So there are aspects that germ theory doesn't explain, but it's a much better job of explaining what they saw at the time. So let me delve a little bit into biology. And so one thing that Kuhn admitted was that he was not a historian of biology. He actually was going through a graduate training program for physics and then decided to do philosophy, history of science. And so he's a little bit weak on the biology and actually I'll explain a little bit of the history with that. So here is like the core idea that we have in biology right now. And that is we can explain biological phenomenon by understanding the theory of evolution as most well described by Charles Darwin as again, the first comprehensive paradigm that was ensconced as a working theory that other people could work off of. So Shiloh, I'll get to your question later, remind me later. But with biology, there's this idea that you have variation within populations and then you have some out-compete others to make more offspring. And over time, some survive better than others. And this is again, a combination of the environment, creating a best case type of scenario, but also you're limited by what genetic material you have in order to adapt to it. And so what I have here in this next slide is just a quick reminder that a lot of the inputs, a lot of the main determining factors of evolution is this randomness. You basically have randomness in the mutations that lead to the variation in organisms. And what is the best, most fit organism at any given time is determined by changes in environment. Which again, one of the things that helped Charles Darwin produce this theory was a paradigm shift in geology. People thought the world was only a few thousand, maybe a few million years old. Maybe geology didn't change, it was not dynamic, but then once Lyle published, then people got a better sense of that. So again, in many cases, the ability to develop a paradigm depends on what other things you know at the time in other fields of science. But what's interesting, again, this type of modification, this type of process in biology. Anomalies, what people have noticed in biology is that when an anomaly comes up, it doesn't necessarily destroy the theory of evolution. And what I am showing here is a slide, this is Lynn Margulis, who basically proposed the idea of neobiogenesis, where, sorry, not neobiogenesis, where she noticed that the organelles that were in cells and the eukaryotic cells had DNA, they seemed to conform to the idea of being, they look more like bacteria in a way. So they were bacteria, or the remnants of a bacterium that was residing inside a larger eukaryotic cell. And that's eventually what she came up with as her theory, which got extended in other ways. But what happened in biology is that people say, oh, we have to overturn biology. And what I am showing in the slide here a little bit lower is Darwin's most famous drawing, his little evolutionary tree branching, which by the way is lost. The original is lost and there's been a call for people to try and refine the original document. They think I've been stolen from the Cambridge Library. Anyway, that aside, if you see it, let them know. But I would have drawn in here as a modification. What's in red is the idea that branches come together. Now again, did this lead to a crisis in biology? In a sense it did, but not that they had to go back and revise everything they thought about evolutionary theory. It ended up becoming more of an extension and a new way of thinking about many components of biology. So there's this oddness where people have noticed, again, especially since Kuhn, that biology seems to be very resistant to this Kuhnian paradigm of paradigms. And I think in response to this, one of the things that Ernst Mayer, who was himself an evolutionary biologist, he worked I think in tropical birds or butterflies. He was an ornithologist working with birds, but he also became a philosopher of science and wrote the most famous kind of paradigm describing history, philosophy, science book, the growth of biological thought. And what he describes is that biology is different and he basically gave these seven characteristics saying, biology has complexity in organizations. It's not like trying to think about elements and chemicals like CO2, those are very simple and then you have building blocks. Well, nature, biology is in a sense inherently complex. It's chemical, it's our unique, that what you really are also looking at is the quality of an organism, not how many of them there are. It's not, you know, it's these mutations, the inheritance patterns. And there's just this inherent variability that we see coming out of an explaining how we observe biology. And then again, the other thing that's important is the bottom two are probably the most important because they stray the most from the way we think about paradigms in physics and chemistry that what we see as biology now is from a historical nature, right? I was mentioning that it's the environment that helps determine stuff and that the nature of the environment is, you can't determine it, that's also unpredictable. So what is best biology doesn't make sense? Oh, sorry, so I will go a little bit faster because now that he's here, are gonna be able to join us. Giuseppe will be able to join us. All right, so I'll finish with this. Not finished, but let me make my final point, which is that in biology, we now really understand the fundamental unit biology. We basically understand all the processes that come out of it. That DNA is this fundamental unit that determines the vast majority of the coding. There are some exceptions or some exceptions that are based on RNA as a code. We even found in the central dogma that when you go from, normally you go from DNA to RNA as a messenger of that genetic information to make proteins. Well, in fact, that actually goes the other way sometimes too. Why does it do that? It's not because there's a fundamental rule that biology has to be that way. It's just that some viruses found going the other way was advantageous and it became a useful thing for them. And then they evolved and survived and now we see them doing this thing that seems to break the paradigm. But in fact, it's just an extension and add-on to the paradigm. And so I think the other large, so that's one point I wanna make about biology is that biology as a field is, I think there's not gonna be any major paradigm shifts because we understand the fundamental units and we understand the vast majority of the processes. So there may be paradigm shifts within biology. There may be subsets, subfields, esoterica that we change our way of thinking about it. But I think the basic idea of biology is that we basically understand how all of this works. So you mentioned dogma, let me finish two more things because actually that will come back to the final slide I have. And that is, I wanna mention also that, well, the key observation from Kuhn and the thing he made is this basic structure of evolution, or sorry, basic structure of how paradigms and theories and science evolve. And he makes some mention about the process and the profession of science. And I wanna say a couple of things I think are extensions to his theory. Is that one, we can get more and more down into the nitty gritty of the fundamental units because technology keeps moving too. And this is a feedback loop where we learn new things, we wanna learn new things, we develop new technologies and then we get to a deeper and deeper, smaller field unit understanding of it. So like in biology, people were very comparative at first. They described stuff, they looked at stuff, they classified and described. And then we had more technology like right field microscopes and centrifuges, electron microscopes, chemistry, recombinant DNA. And now we have basically molecular scissors and molecular microscopes and we can understand the sequence of DNA, we can sequence lots of organisms, we can compare them. We can use computer modeling, we can even synthesize DNA. We have power over the fundamental unit of biology. And there are very few exceptions that the DNA to RNA central dogma works. So that's one aspect where I think Coon, this is kind of a supplement to the way that Coon thinks is that you can, but you need this to keep getting down to those more fundamental units. Now, the last thing I'll mention is the profession of science, that when you think about it, in the early days, people tended to make stuff up. And so, and that's because they didn't have, they were working on their own, a lot of them were actually natural, philosophers of science or even theologians, they were basing some of their ideas on fairy tales. And so, but there's also this process too, where in the professional biology has gone from people start forming societies and then journals, collaborations, then now we got government institution and buy-in, training programs, universities, and even professions of science where there's value and a salary of being a scientist. And then now we're at this point where we have this really highly evolved way of disseminating science, of communicating science, of people having access to science. And this is something where I think we even have this own clear understanding of the scientific process. And this philosophy of science and understanding this process is something that Cesar G. just mentioned also in the local chat, that we even have ways of understanding how to do experiments, like there's a proper falsification method, there are scientific methods, there's statistics, these are all things that are highly evolved now. So the space to come up with really dumb ideas that don't pass the scrutiny of reviewers of publications and pass scrutiny of lots of people looking at it, I think it's also something that as a process is done as well. Again, Berrigan mentions flat earth and I think there's the way that people perceive science and scientific theories, but also I'm basically just trying to describe what's within science. So I'm gonna, and this last graph is something from the Atlantic, which basically describes a combination of how many people are being trained in science, how much money is going in science, how many publications there are. And you can notice that there's just an intense amount of resources being devoted to this to make this, I think a lot of sciences are slowly becoming more mature, the profession of science is something that's more edified and that I think at least in the case of biology in many ways we are in a post-cuny phase. So my understanding is that Giuseppe is available through Zoom or some other method. So I will mute myself by stopping talking and let Berrigan handle, but I can go to questions if Giuseppe is not ready to start presenting. Right, so this is Berrigan, I'm back. And Giuseppe, if you can hear us, why don't you say something on your microphone, let us know that- I can hear you, can you hear me? Yes, thank you. But I am first of all sorry for this delay, I'm trying to solve the problem and to log in in Second Life, but it seems like the region is down from my country. Oh, I see. It is something which has already happened in the past. So basically now I'm trying to connect to be a proxy to the United States and then from there to Second Life. So I hope to be able to do this and so leave me at the end for the final discussion. I hope to join. All right, well, very good. You sound perfect through the Zoom connection, so that's very good. Do you, I know you're struggling with your proxy connection there, but if you can maybe just take a few minutes. I'd just like to invite you to share your thoughts about scientific revolutions and kind of what your experience has been with them. Okay, I can try to summarize. It's a pity because I had prepared the two slides which I still hope to be able to show when I log in in Second Life. Fantastic, okay. Let me apologize with the audience. I cannot see them because I just see a black empty screen. It is not my first time, but in any case, I do apologize. So what is my thought about revolution rights? I am somewhere in the middle. I don't believe in heroes. I don't believe that, let's say, I believe in revolutions, but I don't believe in revolutionary science because I think that at some point the humankind reached the sort of explicative crisis. And at that point, in all fields of the culture, simultaneously, I think after a year ago I gave a talking Second Life on the relationship between physics and art. And my feeling is at some point, the perception of reality goes through very deep shifts which affect basically all matters of human culture, from art, from music to physics. Sometimes physics comes first, sometimes biology comes first, sometimes music and art come first, but at the end, basically, these revolutions affect everything. And so restraining myself to the scientific field, I strongly agree with the idea that most of the science which we do, I mean, when I say we, I mean, the huge community of scientists is paradigmatic. So basically it's something which takes place into a main framework of ideas which is shared, which is propagated through the academy from one generation to the other as the status quo. And this is, it goes ahead until we enter in a period of crisis where the some cracks which are present in the theory cannot be filled anymore and people needs to change completely the paradigm. So I do believe in the distinction between paradigmatic and evolutionary science. For instance, in physics, we have had several of these crisis, one typical, the most known are the advent of quantum mechanics and of general relativity, which not by chance took place more or less at the same time. And in my slide, I was trying to show the connection between the improvements between the growth of technology and methodology and this revolution. I think that there is a strict connection between our capability to measure the universe or the physical world with better instrument and our need to change paradigm. And so I really hope to be able to load the slides because one image is worth more than 1,000 words, I would say, so I hope to be able to do that. So what else, I also, but on the other end, that this may be the contradiction I believe in Popper. I strongly believe in the idea that the theory is valid as long as it is not falsified and that it is not true. I mean, so basically I believe in pacification. So it's a strange compromise of idea. Yes, I think there's an interesting interplay between Popper's idea that science is essentially about falsification, that a theory will be adhered to until it is falsified. I think the bar for falsification gets higher and higher the better understood particular discipline is. For example, Stephen earlier was discussing the dogma, the DNA dogma in biology, that DNA to RNA to protein, which is the essential dogma of biology is so entrenched now that it's extremely unlikely to ever be falsified. And so these things almost transcend to being a paradigm and become, I guess, what you'd call a law of nature. So it's... They may ask you a question. Sorry, I think you're there. Well, what does it mean that they transcend the paradigm and they become law of natures? Law of natures are part of the paradigm. Yeah, there is no absolute truth. So basically in a given paradigm, we assume that there are facts of a nature. I mean, let me make an example because this always happens to me when I am giving popular lectures. One thing is a theory of relativity which states that nothing which has a mass can travel faster than light. And this is a theory which can be falsified, can be overcome. What cannot be overcome is the fact that we observe in the universe and we are sure that this is valid to the edge of the universe that nothing travels faster than light. Facts cannot be falsified. Facts can be improved. Theories can always be falsified. Yes, that's an excellent point. It does, it boils down to facts. Now, just to be... Well... Can I jump in real quick? Just to clarify a point, I think. Yes, Steven, yes. So, I mean, paradigms and science theories really are just our explanation of how we observe and see the universe. And so you can have a revolution in thinking because what we have done is made this human construct that is this description of the natural sciences. And so to me, I think you can have this revolution theory because there's this very big impact in the process of science because you have to change how you approach every experiment you do. And that's kind of where the term revolution comes from is that it really is this widespread revolution of how you then approach the science you're doing because you have this new way of coming at it and thinking about it. So it's very much a human construct in the first place, what is scientific theories? I hope that helps explain that. Giuseppe, I would like to ask you and particularly in your field, do you think that dark matter threatens a paradigm shift in astronomy? Again, dark matter is a phenomenology. I mean, basically, let me put things like this. In this moment, at least 30% of the people who work in from on the theoretical aspects believe that the possible explanation is in the fact that general relativity needs an extension and that therefore dark matter is not due, I mean, to any type of exotic particle, but rather to the fact that general relativity is an approximation to a more general theory which lies behind. So therefore, I think that dark matter is a phenomenology. We observe the depth in the universe to stabilize galaxies or to stabilize clusters of galaxies. We need that you have much more gravitational mass than we have luminous matter. Whether this is due to particles or which we don't know, like for instance, neutralinos or some type of weakly interacting particle or whatever, or rather to the fact that the formalism which we use to describe the space, time and its interaction with mass is not the right one that we need to add some corrective term. So it's again, dark matter cannot be falsified. It's a phenomenology. We see it is there, it can be explained. The theory which explains that matter can be falsified. Yes, that's an excellent point. I think I agree the phenomenology of dark matter does seem irrefutable. I mean, for me, the most powerful evidence is the gravitational lensing that's observed and is theorized to be caused by dark matter. I do think the idea that it's a particle that dark matter is some kind of exotic particle is problematic because it's a particle that doesn't interact at all. Its only manifestation is its effects on gravity, on the curvature of space-time, so that, but the idea that it might be a particle, then we have to figure out a way how to incorporate that particle into the standard model of particle physics. And amateur scientists love to try to identify anomalous particles or anomalous observations that appear to falsify the standard model, but the standard model has proven to be extremely flexible in terms of incorporating novel observations. We were able to expand the standard model to incorporate virtual particles like the Higgs boson and so forth. So it's been very, very flexible, but I do think that a dark matter particle would be a challenge even to the standard model. And also this notion that dark matter might be pointing us toward some more generalized theory of the nature of space-time does suggest that a paradigm shift could be on the horizon if we attain that more generalized theory. And let me put things like this, if I can, I don't want to monopolize the discussion. I think that at this moment, if we should toss a coin in favor or against dark matter, we'll see if it is. For sure, as you said, I mean, if it is a particle, it puts in serious crisis the standard model since a supersymmetry after the discovery of the Higgs boson doesn't seem not to work anymore, because supersymmetry predicted the existence of several candidates for dark matter, but you know, the discovery of the Higgs boson created quite a two problem. And therefore, if it is a particle, you need to revise the standard model. If it is not a particle, you need to revise the general relativity. The first, I think, will be a paradigmatic shift. The second one may be a revolutionary shift, the first one. The second one is a paradigmatic improvement, because basically what you need to do is to take an existing theory and to add an additional term to the tensor which describes the space field and the space-time field. So basically, you know, there are hundreds of theories which do that with quite a success, like FDR, Kaluzak line, and a sponge, and these type of things. There is a lot of theories which at the moment seem capable to explain the observations by modifying the general relativity. And if I can say why I still say 50-50 is because at the moment, to the best of my knowledge, there is not one theory which explains the behavior of dark matter on all scales. So I mean, you need to do a fine-tuning of these theories to describe dark matter inside our galaxy. Another fine-tuning to describe the behavior of dark matter in groups of galaxies again for clusters of galaxies again on a cosmological scale. This basically means that you have an additional degree of freedom which you put every time inside. And you teach me that when you add the degrees of freedom, you always have a better fit to observe the data. So at the moment, there is not one theory or this extended theories which explains all the phenomenology of dark matter. Well, perhaps since there is so much uncertainty, it's maybe premature to say that there even is a paradigm for dark matter. So there's no paradigm to shift. We're still in the process of kind of, maybe a paradigm is still in the process of kind of coalescing around what's happening. Depends on how you define the paradigm. Because I mean, my experience is that you have a paradigm every time the community, I mean, I follow Hilbert's definition. There is, if you want to make a definition of what the geometry is, you just ask a group of people who work in the field put all together from the union of this definition you get the definition of the geometry. Well, I mean, if you look to my experience, every time you have a community of scientists who are very polarized, it means that there is a paradigm. Yes. And in the astronomical and theoretical physics, in this moment there is a huge polarization. Either people work on extended the theory or people work on looking for strange particles capable to just read the dark matter. Therefore, I think there is a paradigm. If not to follow, for sure, in the sociological one. Yes. So, yes, thank you. So just to return to Popper very briefly on this notion of falsification. I mean, I'm not sure that that's always required. I guess one example that occurs to me is Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, which, I mean, I don't really think that Darwin's theory really falsified prior theories about the origin of life. It didn't, in the sense that it didn't prove them wrong, it was simply a better theory that had more explanatory power and seemed to explain the data better than prior theories did, but I wouldn't say that it explicitly falsified them. So, and I think it's fair to say that evolution through natural selection was a paradigm shift. Yeah. Well, yeah, I would agree that that's, in a sense, how the scientific community thought about it. One thing that Kuhn does kind of make a exception to the Popper idea is that science, there was like pre-emergent science and that was the stuff that people thought about evolution before Darwin. And then what eventually emerged out of some discovery or people discussing was the best paradigm that had scientific underpinnings to start the process to feel. And so that's kind of what you would say Darwin's theory of evolution was, was kind of that very first paradigm from which to work off of. And that's actually the amazing thing about Darwin and biology and evolution is that that's probably one of the very few paradigms that has undergone the least fundamental change in terms of how we think about that field now. One of the remarkable things about Darwin's theory is that they didn't know about DNA or anything about, like they knew very little about the actual mechanism and transmission of genes and so forth. They were just observing sort of the phenotypes of animals and their changes through the generations. And yet when we did discover the mechanism by which traits are transmitted in biology, it lined up with evolution. So that's, so that's kind of a remarkable, one of the remarkable things about the power of Darwin's theory, I think. No, I, yeah, I totally agree. And I think what happened was Darwin did a very good job of describing the phenomenon. Then once we got down to the fundamental nuts and bolts of things, the mechanism made it very clear that how that would be modified, how that would fit back into his larger picture. Now, one thing that gives me anxiety about dark matter is that I sort of fear that if dark matter does lead us to a more general theory about the nature of space time, that I'm a little worried that that new theory will overturn some, the underlying science as we've been understanding it. So that makes me look, that the science we know now might become obsolete in a way that Darwin's theory did not become obsolete. Well, and I think also the idea of obsolescence in biology, given how good Darwin's theory was, and that's kind of what Ernst Merer was saying is, in biology, we seem to keep adding on phenomenon that we don't describe as an anomaly. To some degree, you might think of it as an anomaly, but it's more just an extension to, oh, look, something happened that caused this phenomenon to be different than normal. Like say, the retro, you know, reverse transcription of going from RNA to DNA to explain genetic material. Then we say, oh, historically, that happened for these organisms and now they do their thing. And so you don't have to necessarily invalidate or falsify other stuff that happened because it's just so. Here was this historical thing that happened for them. Yeah, I also want to, while I'm thinking of it, I wanna talk a little bit about anomalies and how to evaluate whether an anomaly is really significant enough to falsify an existing paradigm. And again, like one of the, like, with the standard model of particle physics, animator scientists love to point to anomalous observations to show that, oh, see the standard model, we need to dump it, we need to get a new model because this observation is anomalous and can't be accounted for and so forth. And you see that kind of stuff all the time, even among, in the scientific literature, but my feeling is that to be truly anomalous, the observation has to be sort of reproducible and be observed under controlled conditions and so forth. You know, for example, when you were talking about the theory of air and how the candle kept burning, you know, that was not just a single anomalous observation, that was like a phenomenon that anyone could reproduce that didn't fit in with the existing paradigm. So that's like an A plus anomaly, it's not just a one-off odd observation. So I do think that if you're seeking to shift a paradigm, it's insufficient to simply point to some odd ball observation standing alone. And I think that that's, I totally agree that you really have to exhaust the possibilities of how the paradigm would explain the phenomenon because maybe there is just a minor modification need to make to explain it. But I think also these days, and that's why science is different today than it was then, that if you were someone who came out with a, and you're wanting to claiming that this is an anomaly and you publish it, you know, that either gets buried right away as people saying, boy, you messed up and that's not really what you think it is or that's not really an anomaly, or you generate a lot of excitement and then other people very rapidly jump on top of it too. So you can go very quickly from trying to adopt the anomaly from multiple people experimentally verifying it's a true anomaly right away. And I think that's a part of why the modern process of science with all of its publications, journals, professionals, you know, the process of learning how to be a scientist is just fundamentally different as well. I comment on this. I think that, well, I know that this is going to cause probably a quarrel, but I think that the science has reached the sort of saturation. Let me put things over here. There are too many scientists. There are too many publications. And when I was young, I remember, I mean, I've been in the business for quite a long time. I mean, I was 64 or an hour or so. When I was young, I remember sitting in the back door, the back room, the business where slaves were put over Gerard de Voculero was one of the greatest cosmologists at that time. And they told me, okay, for your first year, you just read all the literature which has been published in the field. It was a xylagalaptic and observational cosmology. In 19, from 1981 to 1984, it was still possible for a student to give at least a quick look to the whole literature which had been published before. Obviously, this is no longer possible because only in xylagalaptic astronomy, people will publish something like 350 papers per month. So it's 4,000 papers per year. Either you read or you do research or... Therefore, I think that we are in a deep crisis more than in a period of transition. And I think that the real revolution will be rethinking the way we teach science, the way people acquire expertise in the field because I mean, I could speak about this for hours because this is something which is tormenting me in some respect, but I think that I just am following on your comment, you know, about publication and so on. I mean, we need to find a better way to get in touch with what's happening. And this was basically in the second part of my talk. I think that we should begin to think what will be really the next revolution. And the MFA is a revolution which has little to do with human beings. It's a resolution which has to do with the interaction between human beings and machine, also in doing science, also in doing formation and these type of things. I think that artificial intelligence will play a crucial role in the future, in the scientific revolution and so on. But it seems like finally I'm in second life and even if I am not uploaded my slide, I will try to join you if Shantel teleports me. Fantastic, welcome in world. And that is a really interesting point that we are almost overwhelmed with science nowadays. And I think even from a broader sociological standpoint, I think that this overwhelming amount of science is a little bit socially destructive because I think it feeds into the growth of conspiracy theories. And people nowadays think that they can, you know, go to Prague or you on YouTube or they can go onto Reddit or 4chan or something. And, you know, everyone has some sort of weird scientific data point they can cite to support their conspiracy theory. And, you know, if you debunk a conspiracy theory, it adapts and says, ah, so that debunking is part of the conspiracy. That's what they want you to think and stuff like that. So it becomes like chasing the end of the rainbow. You can just never debunk conspiracy theory. And I think that people are just overwhelmed with information and the conspiracy theories are kind of a psychological attempt to cope with that, to make sense of it. Great, let's see if I can speak. Yes, I hear you, yes. You can hear me. Welcome, all right, we've got you, all right, you're right here. Thank you very much. And, Steven, maybe you can even load your slides into. No, that won't take too long. So it's, let's go, okay. Can you hear me now? Yes. Because by some strange reason I don't see the green things on, over your head. It's a little disorienting. But yes, we hear you. There we go. So I would like to talk a little bit about perhaps the criticisms of Thomas Kuhn and his take on paradigm shifts. I know that Carl Popper is considered kind of a critique of Kuhn, but there is also the other fellow Pharahbend, Paul Pharahbend, and he has also criticized Kuhn. So, Steven or Giuseppe, would either of you like to maybe tell us a little bit about those criticisms? I'm not entirely familiar with the specific criticisms of the one you're mentioning. I think a lot of people, so I'll answer the question kind in general, is that I think a lot of people at the time of Kuhn thought that they were really entrenching the idea that science was just a very progressive process and that in many of them were invested in the science they were doing. So one thing Kuhn does mention is that, of course, people become very invested in their theory and their science and their place within it. And so if you're trying to push them on an individual basis to change their mind or to maybe do something that compromises, say, their grant funding or their research program they've had, they tend to be very resistant to it. So I think as a general point Kuhn pointed something out that was, I think, relevant to the human condition and the way of thinking about things. Beyond that, do you know a little more specifically about what his criticism of Kuhn was? Well, Fireman suggests that Kuhn's conception of normal science can also fit other phenomenon such as organized crime, for example. And also I think he takes issue with the idea that you can distinguish between so-called normal science and then, I guess, paradigm shifting science. Fireman's idea is that it's all science and that the fact that theories get revised or updated or something like that is not really a shift. It's just part of the normal process of science. I hope that's a fair description of it. Okay, yeah, so I can kind of understand a little bit more where I think he's coming from. I think Kuhn did a very interesting thing in his book which was to say, it's really hard to say when something was invented or discovered or exactly the effect it might have had on something. And again, this will go going back more historically. He was talking specifically about the invention of air, steel, levusier and priestly stuff. So there's a little bit less of an issue with that now. We have publication records. Can I comment on, I'm sorry, I'm back in Zoom because I mean, really the region is experiencing some strange problems. So basically I am with my avatar there and I'm speaking through Zoom. Okay, can you hear me? Yes, yes. Sorry for this problem. It's okay. But you know, Second Life is really getting obsolete and somehow how they must improve it. That's the, okay. I think that Firehub and the main objective is that and he brought hundreds of examples about that is that science does not proceed the following method. And therefore every way to formalize the process of scientific discovery, even separating in paradigmatic revolutionary things finds hundreds of counter examples in the everyday practice of science. I think that is a main objection. But in some sense I don't agree because theories or also epistemological theories epistemological theories are just trying to get the general trains out of a huge varieties of phenomenon. And I think that obviously there are many, many exceptions. There are many violation of also the position by Popper. The, and the, but you know, on the general train that I still believe that Kuhn was on the right path. This is why in the mail I wrote to you. I mean, actually there is Firehub and who was against him but it was against all types of generalization of scientific methods. So I think that's fair and it's quite possible that the notion of a scientific paradigm shift resonates more strongly with a popular audience than it does maybe with a scientific audience. But I do think that there are genuine shifts that sort of, that do seem to point to a break in what previous scientific thinking was happening. For example, when Watson and Crick discovered that DNA was the medium that stored genetic information that was very surprising. It's not that biologists didn't know the DNA existed but you know, when you, but DNA is basically doesn't do anything, it's all wrapped up inside the nucleus and it's not really, nothing is really happening with it. It appeared to be, I mean, people didn't really know what its purpose was for a long time. It seems sort of weird, but it wasn't, it doesn't move around, it's not an enzyme, it's not a protein, you know, it doesn't seem to really be doing anything. So the discovery that in fact that DNA codes for the production of proteins by coding for their amino acid sequence was really surprising. So that seems like an example of a real break. Even though it was done through normal, so-called normal science, I think it's fair to say that that was a big change. And I would also say that Einstein's theories, which this whole notion of like, this notion that he could sort of in a sense prove his ideas with his thought experiments really without any observation, that seemed like, that seems kind of new too. That seems like a break in the way theoretical physicists had worked in the past. So I think those are two examples of where I think the idea that something big, some shift really did happen is fair, it's fair to say that those were big changes that do seem like a break from so-called, quote unquote normal science. Can I comment on this? Sure. It's, I don't agree on one thing. I mean, Einstein, I mean, you know, it's like when you study analysis or math at the school, you know, and this is also what renders, in my opinion, math so difficult to learn for many people. You're getting a sort of a frauds and way there. Basically you have all theorems, all demonstrations, all proofs coming out very rationally, very logically, which is what I like, but it is very different from what really happens in reality. And the idea of the ideal experiment, the Gdanken experiment by Einstein is something which she liked to play with after he had done the dirty work. The development of both the general relativity and the special relativity came in a very dirty way. I mean, they were in the air. For instance, the ideas behind the special relativity were already been published in a slightly different and not formally corrected form by Lawrence. And before that, there was also another Polish scientist who had published something exactly in the same direction. So basically the idea that the space and time where somehow connected was in the air, like all ideas, there is never, and this is why I also hate the, I really hate the sort of sanctification of scientists. Students to end up in believing that Einstein's, Newton, Feynman are sort of super humans. They were absolutely smart people, intelligent people, incredibly intelligent people, who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Einstein arrived in a moment when it was clear, in spite of what his supervisor, Max Planck, but what his consultant, let's say, Max Planck told him, he arrived in a period in which physics was in deep crisis. Too many things did not fit together. And these things ended up in his revision of the idea of space-time, it was successful. The one by Lawrence, in fact, we called the transformation Lawrence transform, not by chance, because they were introduced by Lawrence, not by Einstein. It was successful, but the idea was in the air. The same thing was for general, a little less, but more or less it was also for general relativity. Also general relativity basically was in the air because already Max in the philosophical principle of mechanics had raised the problem that some deep revision was needed in order to explain the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass. So, let me interrupt just a little bit. So, because that's a little bit at odds with my understanding of the history because I had, it was my understanding that at the turn of the 19th century, physicists were feeling pretty smug that they felt that physics was finished, physics was in a crisis because once Maxwell had sort of united magnetism and electricity, physicists really didn't know really what more there was to do. That seemed to be the end of physics. But then Einstein wrote his paper on the photoelectric effect, which was kind of an anomalous observation, right? The photoelectric effect seemed anomalous to Maxwell's theories. So that was a change there. Can I say something? No, I don't agree on that because basically what happened is that even when Max Planck went to ask his supervisor what to do, he told him do not choose physics because physics is a closed field. But this was true, let's say, till the last decade of the 19th century. But at the end of the 19th century, two, three main experiments came out, Michelson and Morley, which basically- Yes, the Michelson-Morley, yes, right. The state of light, yes. And therefore, this proved the existence of either and therefore required a deeper vision of the electromagnetic theory because you had waves without, you know. Second, Max Planck paper on the black body, which introduced the quantum of energy. And this basically made the two cracks in the building so- and in parallel, sorry, also Ludwig Boltzmann who made some important considerations in statistical mechanics. These three things basically made a crack in the classical physics. In fact, if you see the Anno Smirabilis by Einstein in 1905, you have the first paper where basically he uses the Michelson-Morley to derive the constants of the speed of the light. Then you have the paper on the Brownian motion where he used Boltzmann-improved innovation in statistical mechanics. And then you have the third paper of the photoelectric effect where he uses the Planck idea that energy had to be discretized. So basically, the old seeds were in cracks due to experimental improvements that are the experiments which make the paradigm fail. So, yeah, forgive me, I was just typing in local chat here. So, yeah, so this is all quite interesting and it does make me revise my earlier comments about anomalies, not necessarily always being meaningful because I will admit that even with the confidence that physicists had at the turn of the 19th century and as people are pointing out in the nearby chat, there were a number of observations that weren't, that were interesting and which did suggest that physics, in fact, was not finished, that there was more work to do. And you could consider those experiments or those observations, I guess, to be sort of anomalous. And in fact, investigating those anomalies turned out to be extremely fruitful. So that's an instance where, again, these are kind of anomalies that were facts, however, they weren't just odd or problematic observations, they turned out to be actual facts that had to be explained somehow. So they did end up contributing to the growth and the development of physics. Maybe another fun example was the recent observation of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, which led to the speculation that, you know, Venus might have life in its atmosphere that's producing the phosphine. But with following the scientific method, there, very shortly thereafter, came out reports that the way they analyzed their data suggests that they may not have observed phosphine at all, after all. Exactly, yes, as Sissi G is pointing out. So that's an example where an anomalous observation was made or reported in the atmosphere of Venus, which turned out to, the fact that it wasn't anomaly caused it to get scrutinized. And that scrutiny ended up revealing the truth. So that seems all part of the sort of the healthy way that science is supposed to work. So I think we're kind of getting close to our allotted time. So maybe we should maybe try to wrap up here a little bit. Giuseppe, would you like to, do you have any closing remarks you would like to make to maybe summarize your position or elaborate on anything you've talked about? And maybe we can start to wind it down. I just would like to make a final comment as people who are, I don't know, I recognize in the public, many people who ever come to my previous lectures. I do believe that we are on the verge of a revolution in this moment. And this will be an omnicomprehensive revolution basically will affect the field. And it's the advent of what people used to call artificial intelligence, but basically it's just a better, more efficient way for human beings to interact with machines. And this is going definitely to change deeply science just for the simple reason that until now, let me put things like this. We all, especially scientists, but we all are extremely proud of our brain in the sense that everyone thinks that the brain is a unique machine, perfect machine. Actually, the brain is a very faulty machine which introduces a lot of bias, even the best brains, let's say, are a rather faulty machine. We just don't realize because there is no way. I mean, we are inside our brain so we cannot see how bad it works. But one question which I always rise, and this is why is anyone in the audience, does anyone in the audience know any physical, biophysical, chemical, low, which depends on more than three independent variable? So, yeah. No. No. I mean, try. I mean, this is a question. Really, if someone knows, I mean, I've been repeating this question in all session, in all places all over the world and I never got the answer. This is a... Would you restate it, Giuseppe? I mean, let me put things like this. Every physical low has a number of independent variable. Let me make a simple example. Force equal mass times acceleration. You have three quantities, two of them are independent. The third one, once you have fixed mass and acceleration, you know the force, right? So my question is, do you know any physical, biophysical, even the standard model of particles which depends on more than three independent variables? And the answer is always no. And this problem is not because the universe is a particularly simple place. It's just because our brain does not allow us to discover pattern or trends in more than three dimension, only because, I mean, we are born like that. We have evolved in a world which was three dimensional and our brain was trained by evolution to recognize all the only three dimensional plane patterns, structure. And these patterns are the forerunners of physical theories or of understanding. This is why I mentioned that theories are just a compression algorithm to synthesize pattern in the parameter space. But nowadays, for instance, in cosmology, in particle physics, we have a parameter space which are not three dimensional, but we achieve hundreds of dimensions. Yes, so this ties in with your current research. If I understand you correctly, you're thinking that as we become more, as we work more intimately with machine intelligence, we will expand our ability to understand beyond more than the three variables. We will now be able to examine systems with many, many more independent variables, and that's going to be a true revolution. Okay, fascinating. And also, I will say is an excellent segue for me to plug next month's panel discussion, which will be about the future of virtual worlds. So I hope everyone will note that and look for the announcements about our next panel on the prospects for virtual worlds. All right, well, very good. We're almost at the hour and a half, which Chantel generously allotted to us. So let me just thank Giuseppe very much for putting up with all of his technical issues to join. Oh, I apologize, we did own the view, because I mean, it was really a mess, but I mean, I do apologize. Sorry, my bad, I'm really... Not at all, it's the way of the world these days. I just really appreciate that you were dedicated enough to join us in the end. It was really valuable to have you here. We appreciate it so much. I also want to extend my thanks to Stephen and his presentation. Stephen had to leave early for a personal matter. And I want to thank Chantel again and everyone at the Science Circle for hosting us and promoting this event and making the space available. So thank you all very much and have a fantastic rest of your day. Goodbye. Thank you, bye.