Is Socratic thought hitting the limit in the physical sciences as well as in law, philosophy and politics.
The Socratic method of classifying and discovering what is by endless questioning and attacking of propositions has come unstuck in biology and physics.
In biology, the great classifiers of palaeontology early this century put the fossils of the Canadian Burgess Shale into the standard slots of evolutionary thought. Organisms, slowly and steadily adapting to the environment around them and through gradual mutation and survival of the fittest, varied and diversified gradually over the millions of years since life began on earth. Didn’t they?
A rethinking of the Burgess fossils in the 1970s changed that. The fossils were exactly the same. The thinking was different.
The story is in Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould (a must read for all thinking non-scientists). Evolution is not gradual at all. It comes in sudden bursts. A cosmic dust storm every 60 million years or so wipes out a stack of species in mass extinctions and in a very short geologic time hundreds of new species and many new phyla arise in a mass explosion of species. And then, rather than diversifying, they contract gradually. For example, there were 20 phyla alone in the Burgess Shale (one gravel pit which preserved a tiny part of the earth’s organisms after the Cambrian explosion of species of 530 million years ago).
New thinking new story.
And in physics, is it mass or is it energy? Go on, measure its speed and mass to find out what it is. The classification by boxes so beloved by the inheritors of Socratic thought is useless in the face of the problems of modern physics.
The mere act of measuring or observing the mass of a particle makes it impossible to also measure its speed. It can be either energy or mass depending of the observation being made.
We not only have to think again. We have to change the (italic) way (end italic) we think again.