Civilization #43: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

It was Dante who helped give birth to the idea of modernity, launching three major movements: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. We would not have modernity without Dante.

Let's see how the three connect. The Renaissance was a celebration of what makes us human. Before, the focus was on the Divine, on the idea of God; now, we wanted to tell the story of what it means to be human. Protestantism believes that we have direct access to God. In the Catholic religion, the pope is the divine representative and the clergy are the spokespersons for God, but Protestantism believes that we should be able to speak with God directly through the Bible. The Scientific Revolution is really about the question: how can we know God?

Dante's Three Messages and the Dawn of Science

These ideas originate with Dante. In the dialogue between Beatrice and Dante, Beatrice explains a core concept. She says that God is perfect, and whatever God touches or creates is perfect. If that's the case, why is there decay, destruction, and death in this world? What are the forces that give rise to this decay?

She explains that whatever God creates directly is perfect, so angels are perfect—they're immortal and eternal. However, the elements in this world are not created directly by God. What is created by God are the divine laws that underlie the universe. God created the atoms and the laws that allow these atoms to interact with each other.

The rays and motion of the holy lights draw forth the soul of every animal and plant from matter able to take form.

It's these divine laws that create animals and plants, but these laws also necessitate that they die for new forms to come into being. This is the idea of evolution. We humans are special because we are both divinely created and created by the laws of the universe; we have a dual nature. The main advantage of this dual nature is that it gives us the capacity to imagine. The issue with God is that God is perfect. If you're perfect, eternal, and immutable, you lack an imagination because there are no boundaries to you. But if you're human, you're forced to have an imagination because you will make mistakes, you will fail, and there are things that you do not know. The imagination gives you the capacity to know this world and to perfect it. That's what it means to be fundamentally human.

Dante relays three main messages to us through his poetry:

1. God is within us. We know this because we are capable of loving others. God is the light of love within us. The more we love someone, the more this light grows. We must focus on loving someone who is dear to us.
2. We have the imagination and thus the responsibility to discover the universal laws underlying reality. God created the laws of the universe and created us in order to know these laws. This is fundamental to the idea of science.
3. We can master these laws to better our reality.

These are the three hidden messages of the Divine Comedy that would influence the development of science in the Western world.

Science in Ancient Societies

In ancient societies, the major civilizations were China, Egypt, and India. You will see a lot of similarities among these three civilizations in how they practiced science. It's very intuitive and imaginative.

Sacred Geometry

The first science they focused on was the idea of sacred geometry. The idea of sacred geometry is that the underlying fundamental structure of the universe and reality are geometric shapes. From these geometric shapes, you can give rise to every possible reality.

This is called the Egg of Life, and from the Egg of Life, if you just keep expanding it, you will get all of reality. These are actually 3D and 4D shapes that can't be illustrated here.

There are two possible ways to understand sacred geometry. The first is to understand it as solids, which is how the Egyptians and Plato understood them. A lot of Plato's philosophy is derived from the Egyptians, and the idea of sacred geometry is very apparent in his writings. The basic idea is that if you train yourself on how to understand and manipulate sacred geometry in your head, you can access God.

The other way to understand sacred geometry is as vibrations, as energy, as a force. This is the way that the Chinese understand it—as chi, or life force—as well as the Hindus. Imagine a monk who's meditating. He's breathing and focusing his energies to achieve the sacred geometry within him. The monk will often say things like "Om." He's causing vibrations that try to mimic the sacred geometry.

Why is he doing this? Because the belief at this time is that if there is a creator God, the question is, how does it think? It's not going to think with words the way we do; it's going to think using mathematics, with sacred geometry. By thinking, he is going to create the underlying universe. He does it by breathing—breathing in, creating sacred geometry, and then breathing out. This inhaling and exhaling gives rise to the universe. So if you're a monk or a priest, you practice meditation to try to mimic the act of creation. If you succeed, you harmonize yourself with the vibrations of the universe and are therefore able to access divine energy.

Astronomy and Astrology

The second big field that the Egyptians, Chinese, and Indians were passionate about is astronomy and astrology. The Egyptians basically created astrology. The idea is that you're trying to link the movement of the stars and the cosmos with events in the world. By understanding the movement of the stars, you're able to divine or predict the future of humanity. Every major king had an astrologist to divine the future through the practice of astronomy and astrology.

Alchemy

The last thing is alchemy, which is basically chemistry and sorcery combined. This was a polytheistic world, and the idea is that because it's a polytheistic and chaotic world, if you are clever enough, you're able to hack it. Think of it as hacking; there are secrets to this world. You are able to take elements, combine them together, and create something called the philosopher's stone. The philosopher's stone is the power of God, able to give you the elixir of immortality to live forever, as well as to manipulate the environment—basically, to turn lead into gold. This was an extremely popular practice in ancient societies.

These three major sciences in primitive societies—China, Egypt, and India—promulgated outwards and influenced other societies. We still have them today. There are still people who practice alchemy, sacred geometry, and astrology.

Premodern vs. Modern Science

What's the difference between premodern science and modern science? Let's focus on the three major differences.

Premodern science focuses on the spiritual, the otherworldly. The point of science was to create harmony between our world and the spiritual world, because if you harmonize these two worlds, you can have a more prosperous, peaceful future. Today, we are only focused on the material world—the world that we can see and know—in order to create progress. We've abandoned the spiritual world and focused on this material world to manipulate it and promote technological progress. And quite honestly, we have been extremely successful at that. In fact, I will argue we've been too successful.

Premodern science relies entirely on intuition and imagination. You don't do experiments, have conferences, or debate; you just meditate and dream. You often fall into trances to communicate with the spiritual world. They used a lot of hallucinogenics, including magic mushrooms and a drink called Soma, which is very important in the Hindu and Zoroastrian religions. Today, we don't rely on intuition and imagination; we think this is superstitious. We rely mainly on something called the scientific method.

Finally, in premodern science, people relied on divine inspiration to discover the truth. The big question was, "What is truth?" Today, we care about the question, "How do we know truth?" It's really the idea of the institutionalization of doubt. Our main priority is to question and doubt the truth. Because of this emphasis change—from "what is truth" to "how do we know truth"—it launched a revolution in technological progress.

The Theological Assumptions of the Scientific Revolution

Underlying the Scientific Revolution are three major theological assumptions. Without them, the revolution would not have been possible.

1. Monotheism: There is one God. The very idea of monotheism is revolutionary in human thought.
2. Intelligent Design: God designed and willed the universe into being. There is an intelligent design to the universe, and it's up to us to discover it.
3. Human Capacity: God endowed us with the capacity to discover His design and will.

These theological assumptions are why the revolution happened in Western Europe and not, say, in China, the Islamic world, or India.

What do these assumptions bring us? Throughout most of human history, most societies have been polytheistic. What is the difference between a polytheistic worldview of science and a monotheistic one?

Monotheism is really an intellectual revolution, first and foremost.

Three major forces drove the Scientific Revolution. The first was the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. The Protestants challenged the authority of the church, and the church responded with the Counter-Reformation. There's a prejudice that the Catholic Church is anti-science, but it is not. In fact, both the Protestants and the Catholic Church were trying to use science to promote their legitimacy and authority. The Protestants were heavily devoted to science because they wanted to understand the will and mind of God. The Catholics themselves were also promoting science. They created a new society called the Jesuits, who are renowned for being great scientists. A lot of universities in this world were founded by Jesuits, who also went to China and promoted knowledge and science there for many centuries. Both the Catholic Church and the Protestant movement were in a struggle to use science to promote their own authority.

The second force was war. During this time, Europe was in a constant state of war, fighting amongst themselves between Catholics and Protestants, and also fighting with the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, which was the strongest empire in the world at this point.

The last idea driving science was the Age of Exploration and Conquest. As Europe tried to expand outwards to North America and South America, they needed better navigation tools, compasses, and astrolabes. Science solved all three problems.

From "What is Truth?" to "How Do We Know Truth?"

The best way to remember the Scientific Revolution is that it's a fundamental change from asking "What is truth?" to "How do we know truth?" Believe it or not, no one really bothered to ask this question before. Because science asked this question, it separated itself from religion and put itself above religion. Religion purports to be the truth, and what science was saying is, "How do you know if you're right? We know if you're right because we have methods to test you." Science was putting itself above religion, and as you can imagine, this would create conflicts within the Catholic Church, mainly in the trial of Galileo.

Because science asks, "How do we know truth?" it creates the scientific method, which is composed of three main elements:

1. Ask questions and propose hypotheses. There are no questions now that are out of bounds, and you have to think of solutions and ideas to solve these questions.
2. Processes and protocols for testing hypotheses. This is basically experimentation. Only if you can experiment, and only if your hypothesis matches experimental results, can it be true.
3. A system of doubt and criticism to test all experimental results. Today, we call them academic societies and peer-review journals. If you're a scientist working today at a university, whatever results you have, you must first publish and then present them to a conference of peers who will criticize you and look for flaws in your argument.

This is an extremely effective system for knowing what is true. Because of this system, it has allowed for a remarkable explosion of wealth, technology, and progress in the world today.

For most of human history, progress—meaning productivity—has been flat. Then, starting around the year 1700, it starts to exponentially rise. This has meant that we are now able to feed more and more people. Before 1700, you really couldn't get above a few hundred million people, and now we are projected to reach nine billion. You can ask if this is a good thing, and I will argue it's not, but it shows us the remarkable power of science.

The Geocentric vs. Heliocentric Debate

What caused the scientific method to arise? It really has to do with a major debate among scientists: the geocentric versus the heliocentric debate. What's interesting is that if you look at the Egyptians, they knew that the sun was the center of the universe; that's why their god was a sun god, Ra. But by the time you hit the Greeks, there was a divergence between those who believed the universe revolved around the sun and those who believed it revolved around the Earth.

In about 150 AD, a Greek scientist named Ptolemy, working in Egypt, developed the first comprehensive cosmological system. In his book, the Almagest, he made certain arguments. The first was that the Earth stands still; it does not move or revolve. Second, all other celestial bodies—including the moon, the stars, and the planets—revolve around the Earth in a circular motion. Why? Because in the heavens, it is assumed that everything is perfect. For example, on planet Earth, we breathe air; oxygen is what gives us life. But up in space, air becomes ether, the air that the gods breathe. Ether is what allows the heavens to be perfect.

Because Ptolemy's perspective aligned with theology and the Bible, it was accepted as truth for over a thousand years. The Islamic Golden Age relied heavily on Ptolemy's understanding of the cosmos.

The first person to suggest that this model was wrong was Copernicus, a Polish polymath who did many things, including astrology and astronomy. When he died in 1543, he proposed the heliocentric model. What's really important to remember is that Copernicus was a devout Catholic, and many of his friends were major figures within the Catholic Church. They were extremely supportive of his theory; in fact, they wanted him to publish it. At this point, there was no conflict between science and religion. The saying back then was: "It is the job of the Catholic Church to tell you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." The Catholic Church didn't really care about the geocentric or heliocentric model.

The problem with Copernicus was that the mathematics didn't really make sense. If I put two books in front of you—Copernicus's book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres or Ptolemy's book—most scientists would tell you that Ptolemy's book is better. There's more math, and it's more well-argued. The reason is that Copernicus's idea was new, so he didn't have much time to refine it, and people hadn't had time to work on it. In contrast, thousands of people had been working on Ptolemy's model over the centuries. The geocentric model was much more refined and accepted at this point than the heliocentric model.

Tycho Brahe, a Danish polymath from a noble family, spent a lot of his time doing observations. He collected a lot of data on how the planets moved, and his conclusion was that the geocentric and heliocentric models were both correct. His proposal was that the Earth was the center of the world, but the planets revolved around the sun. So, the sun revolved around the Earth, and every other system revolved around the sun.

He had a protégé named Johannes Kepler, a German who looked at the data and discovered that it actually supported the heliocentric model more than the geocentric model. Because he was not a member of the Catholic Church—he was a Lutheran—the Church couldn't really do anything about him. What's remarkable about Kepler is that just from this data, he was able to make certain predictions about the stars that we've confirmed over time.

First, he argued that everything revolves around the sun. His problem, though, was that he didn't put the sun at the center of the universe; he put something else there. The sun revolved around that, and the Earth revolved around the sun. Second, his major law of planetary motion was that the orbit is actually not circular; it's elliptical. That's what the data was telling him. This goes against theology because, remember, in theology, the heavens are perfect because that's where God lives. But Kepler was saying the orbit is elliptical. What he also did that was revolutionary was discover that there was a correlation between this orbit and the mass of the planet. This would give rise to Newton.

The Trial of Galileo

Now comes Galileo. He lived in Florence at this time, so he was under the purview of the Catholic Church. He came from a pretty normal background. When he grew up, he wanted to be a monk, but his dad wanted him to become a doctor instead. They made a compromise, and he went to study mathematics, but his dad was insistent that he study medicine. Eventually, Galileo managed to do what he wanted and just do science.

At this point, the telescope had been invented. It was not a great telescope; it could give you three times the magnification of the human eye. But with this new invention, Galileo did amazing things. The first thing he did was discover that Jupiter had moons. This was revolutionary because it was assumed that everything revolved around Earth, but now he showed that moons revolved around Jupiter. He also recognized that from Earth, you're able to see Venus spin, which was also revolutionary because it was assumed that Earth stood still.

He wrote a book about this, and it was a sensation. He became the court scientist to the Medici family, and the Catholic Church thought this book was great. The thing about Galileo, which is very important, is that he was a very arrogant man. Because he was promoting the heliocentric model, he was coming into conflict with a lot of well-established academics who made their living off the geocentric model. Galileo's arguments were very limited; remember, this was a new idea, not really supported by mathematics or a lot of data. So Galileo's entire logic was, "I speak to God, I know the truth, and you're all idiots." That was basically how he spoke to his enemies.

As you can imagine, he had more and more enemies, and they were devising ways to get at him. One thing Galileo was saying privately that he should not have been saying concerned scripture. People were saying to him, "Listen, this heliocentric model is fine, but it goes against scripture." Scripture says that the Earth is firm and immovable. Also, if you look at Genesis, it's clear that God created the Earth first and then created the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars. So logically, everything should revolve around Earth. How do you explain this conflict?

Galileo's response was, "It's my job to interpret scripture." This, as you remember, is heresy. If you disagree with the church, that's not heresy; that could just be ignorance. But if you believe that you are above the church, if you refuse to accept its authority, if you believe that you interpret the Bible better than the church, that is heresy.

Galileo was called before the Inquisition to explain himself. He was pretty confident; he had the support of the Medicis, he was a famous author, and he was extremely intelligent. He thought that God loved him. As you can imagine, it was a complete disaster. The Inquisition told him to shut up. He could write anything he wanted privately but was not to promote his views anymore. Because if you were guilty of heresy, you could be burnt at the stake, Galileo had no choice but to follow this order.

That is, until 1632. The old pope died, and the new pope, Urban VIII, came into power. Urban VIII was a very good friend of Galileo's and a huge admirer. So Galileo felt he now had permission to get back at his enemies. He wrote a book called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It was almost like a Platonic dialogue where he presented his argument again for the heliocentric model. Not only that, but he made fun of his enemies. The chief enemy of Galileo in the dialogue was named Simplicio. Not only that, but he put into the mouth of Simplicio a lot of the arguments from Pope Urban VIII. He was making fun of the pope, even though they were very good friends.

As you can imagine, the pope was really pissed. At first, he banned the book. What happens when you ban a book? You make it into a national bestseller. Everyone was reading this book. Now Urban VIII was really angry, so he called for the Inquisition. Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition and had to explain himself. He was coming up with a lot of silly excuses. He said, "Listen, this book is a satire, it's a thought experiment. I know that the heliocentric model is wrong, so I wrote this book as an intellectual exercise to see how wrong it could be and to see if it could be right." It didn't work, and they basically put him under arrest. At this point, Galileo's friends pleaded with the pope, and the pope said, "Fine, I'm a generous person. I will commute his sentence to house arrest for the rest of his life."

You can make the argument that it was Galileo's personality that was responsible for his trial and downfall. It was his hubris, a classic Greek tragedy. But historically, that's not how we remember the story. Remember, there was a major conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics, so the Protestants used this trial as propaganda against the church. They would say, "You see how anti-science the church is." Galileo would be remembered as the father of modern science because he put science above religion. Even though Galileo was disgraced during his time, eventually the Florentines would dig up his grave and put his body beside Michelangelo and Dante. That's how much they revered his contribution.

Newton and the Triumph of Mathematics

Even though the theory of heliocentrism is correct, the mathematics didn't make any sense at this time in history. If you had a team of scientists look at the geocentric argument versus the heliocentric argument, they would say the geocentric argument makes more scientific sense. It was not until Newton that the mathematics came into being that allowed for the heliocentric model to be widely accepted.

Newton is the person who created calculus. What's really interesting to know about Newton is that he didn't really see himself as a mathematician or scientist; these were side hobbies. What he really was was a theologian. He spent most of his time reading the Bible because he was convinced that within the Bible were the secrets of the universe. Specifically, he wanted to know when the world would end. He spent most of his life doing these calculations and told us that the world will probably end around 2060.

This is important because even at this time, as the Scientific Revolution was gaining steam, there was no separation between religion and science. People understood faith as a very important cornerstone of science. Without faith, how could you have the energy and inspiration to understand the mind of God?

Newton is also famous for being an alchemist. He spent most of his time doing science experiments where he was trying to combine different elements. Unfortunately, chemistry at this point was very primitive. He was taking mercury, convinced that it would lead to the philosopher's stone, and he was eating it and tasting it. As a result, he had a lot of mercury poisoning problems: he couldn't sleep, he had delusions, his hair was falling out. But at the same time, he had the inspiration to come up with the mathematics to prove the heliocentric model correct.

The book he wrote is called the Principia. At this time, Latin was the universal language of scientists, who were called "natural philosophers." Science was considered a part of philosophy. In 1687, this debate ended with the publication of this book. Newton used mathematics to prove once and for all the heliocentric model.

In this book, you also find his laws of motion. Newton's great insight was that the laws of attraction—gravity—that govern this world probably govern the heavens as well. Before, it was assumed that the heavens and the Earth were separate, and now he was saying that they are combined. He created laws of planetary motion, figuring out the mathematics that told us the relationship between the size of the planets, their mass, and how they orbited.

The problem he had was that he had the mathematical correlation, but he didn't know why the correlation existed. He couldn't solve the causation problem. There was just no way that God would spend his time moving the planets around; He was much too busy. There had to be an underlying cause, but he didn't know what it was.

Einstein and the Fabric of Spacetime

Who figured it out? Einstein. In 1905, we knew there was a correlation between the size of a planet and how it moved, and gravity, but we didn't know why. It was the genius of Einstein to figure it out. You remember Einstein because of his famous equation, E = mc². What does this mean? It means that mass and energy are correlated. This was a revolution. We didn't understand this before; we just assumed that solids and vibrations were different. What Einstein was saying is that for a solid to exist, there have to be vibrations in the first place. This formula tells us that within all objects, there is an almost infinite amount of energy, because c is the speed of light. This is important because this formula would allow us to develop the nuclear bomb. By splitting the atom, you can create an almost infinite amount of energy.

That was a major contribution, but at his time, he was mainly known for figuring out the causation problem in space. Einstein figured it out by developing a new idea called spacetime. He believed that in the heavens, there was a spacetime curvature. What was happening was that a huge object would go into the spacetime curvature and warp it. Because it warped it, it drew things into its orbit, and these things would have to move around this solid. Spacetime curvature now helps us understand the laws of planetary motion first developed by Kepler and then refined by Newton.

What's amazing about Einstein is that he did all this while sitting at a desk at a patent office in Switzerland. He was not in a laboratory or at a university; he was just daydreaming. The mathematics is very complicated, but all you need to understand is that he figured out there's a mathematical relationship between the mass of an object and the spacetime curvature.

Mathematics is important because it allows us to make predictions, and these predictions tell us if the science actually works or not, if the theory makes sense. Einstein's theory of relativity and spacetime curvature is one of the most successful models in history because it predicts the black hole. The black hole is a solid that is infinitely massive and therefore attracts everything into it, including light. We discovered the black hole, which confirms the theory of relativity.

But the theory of relativity also predicts the Big Bang. The idea of spacetime is that space is in motion; that's why you have time. Well, if it's in motion, then where did it start? There had to be a starting point, and that's why scientists—not Einstein, who was actually against the idea—believed that you needed a Big Bang. We have a working model of the Big Bang, but the problem is that there's actually a lot of evidence against it.

For example, using the Hubble telescope, we've discovered that there are galaxies that came into being much, much earlier than we expected. The idea of the Big Bang is that it's a massive energy explosion, and so the gases will develop later, but our data tells us the galaxies came before they were due. The second problem is that this universal expansion is not constant. There are times when it actually speeds up, which makes no sense.

A lot of scientists are now trying to reexamine the Big Bang model. The problem is, we don't have a better theory. To get around the problem of these mathematical inconsistencies, scientists created a new concept called dark energy. You might think dark energy means we can't see it, but that's not what it means. You might think it means we can't measure it, but that's not what it means either. Dark energy means we don't know what it is. It doesn't mean it exists and we can't see it; it just means we have no idea what it is. We cannot explain why the Big Bang is expanding really fast at certain points and really slow at other points, so we just say it must be dark energy.

The Scientific Method as Bureaucracy

The person who was most responsible for the creation of the scientific method was Francis Bacon. He spent his entire life promoting the idea of scientific processes and methods. He's most well-known for his book The New Atlantis. In this novel, the protagonist ends up on an island where they have the most advanced science in the world. The reason they have the most advanced science is because they turned science into a bureaucracy, a very specialized bureaucracy.

There are different offices and bureaucracies for different functions. For example, "We have three that try new experiments, such as themselves think good. These we call Pioneers or Miners." You have an office specifically to do experiments, which means you have another office to come up with hypotheses and ask questions. "We have three that take care out of them to direct new experiments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former. These we call Lamps." You have a team to audit these experiments and figure out how to improve them. "Lastly, we have three that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature." These are the theoreticians, the ones who will take this experimental data and combine it into a theory.

Bacon was proposing a scientific bureaucracy, and we have basically achieved his vision today. If you look at science today, it's essentially a bureaucracy.

One of the foundations of this bureaucracy was the founding of the Royal Society of London in 1660. This was important because for the first time, scientists were allowed to present their findings before a group of peers who would question and doubt them, enhancing their research process. The founding of the Royal Society was fundamental. What came next were publications and magazines that would showcase these new discoveries. The founding members of the Royal Society included Christopher Wren, a very famous architect, as well as Robert Boyle, a very famous chemist.

The Modern Crisis in Science

The Scientific Revolution separated science from religion, and there's a lot of concern that this has created ethical issues within science. Let's look at three major issues:

1. Artificial Intelligence: We're basically trying to create God. What happens when computers are much smarter than humans?
2. Nanotechnology: We're trying to go into the atomic level and change the laws of nature. We're trying to defy God.
3. Genetics: We are trying to change people's genetic blueprint so that we can have designer babies, free from cancer. We're also trying to develop immortality.

My argument is that this is the wrong question to ask. These are not possible within the current scientific framework that we have today. In fact, I would make the argument that these three are essentially illusions, hocus pocus, magic, or even deliberate scams. Artificial intelligence is the example we are most familiar with. I'm sure you've all used ChatGPT. Is it any good? No, it's not. Will it get any better? No, it won't. But there's so much hype around it.

The real problem is this: science has become an imperial bureaucracy. If you think about the world we live in today, the field that is most like the imperial bureaucracy of China is science. Today, science is above nations and governments; it does things by itself. And what is science doing? It's promoting its own bureaucracy. If there's no accountability, if there's no responsibility, if scientists don't actually have to tell us what they're doing, then it's not that they will become God; it's more like they'll become corrupt bureaucrats. It's more likely that they will take all these billions of dollars the government gives them and just waste it all. Why? Because they can. It's much easier for people to be lazy, greedy, and corrupt than it is for them to become God.

Genius does not come from hard work. It does not come from the scientific process or method. It comes from intuition, imagination, and inspiration. Remember when Einstein was just daydreaming his theories. Remember when Newton was working on theology and alchemy, and then he developed the ideas of calculus. This is true consistently throughout history.

This is a passage from the book The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby.

Many of science’s central ideas seem to come from beyond the limits of rationalism. People do not logically deduce these ideas. René Descartes dreams of an angel who explains the basic principles of materialist rationalism to him. This is no different from Muhammad, who was meditating in a cave and the angel Gabriel appeared before him. It's religious. Albert Einstein daydreams in a tram approaching another and conceives the theory of relativity. James Watson scribbles on a newspaper in a train, then rides his bicycle to reach the conviction that DNA has the form of a double helix.

What gives rise to great science and great ideas? Imagination, intuition, and also faith that you are correct. That's Galileo. He was convinced that he was right, even though the science was very sloppy. There's a famous story where Einstein, in the 1930s and 40s, was having a huge argument with scientists who were arguing for quantum mechanics, specifically Niels Bohr. If you look back at the arguments, you will find that Einstein was very clear, logical, and scientifically sound. You will find that Niels Bohr was unclear, illogical, and very sloppy with his science. But Einstein was wrong, and Niels Bohr was right. Today, quantum mechanics is the science that underlies all the technology we have, including the computer.

Science at first seems wrong, but because the people who believe in it have so much conviction and faith, they eventually triumph.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This is the argument of Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is the first book you will read if you ever study the history of science because he goes into how science develops over the centuries. The central argument is that science does not develop piecemeal, slowly, and methodically. It goes through revolutions and paradigm shifts.

Here are some key passages from Kuhn:

Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.

Ptolemy, for his time, was considered revolutionary because he solved the problem of why the moon revolves around the Earth. He provided a cosmology that was simple and fit into theology.

To be more successful is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number. The success of a paradigm... is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples.

A paradigm at first is promising, but it's not at all convincing.

Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.

This is really important. Science is not about discovery; it's about refinement. Science will not give us new ideas; it will take existing ideas and fine-tune them into something that we can believe and use to drive technological innovation.

Turn now to another, more difficult, and more revealing aspect of the parallelism between puzzles and the problems of normal science. If it is to be classified as a puzzle, a problem must be characterized by more than an assured solution. There must also be rules that limit both the nature of acceptable solutions and the steps by which they are to be obtained. To solve a jigsaw puzzle is not, for example, merely to make a picture. Either a child or a contemporary artist could do that by scattering selected pieces, as abstract shapes, upon some neutral ground.

What he's saying is this: science today solves jigsaw puzzles. They're trying to take a larger model and fine-tune pieces that make the model more elegant. It's not trying to reimagine the model, over-turn the model, or add new pieces. All it's doing is fine-tuning existing pieces. It's like you take a jigsaw puzzle, and there's exactly one solution. If you don't provide that solution, you're wrong.

Nevertheless, such a picture would not be a solution. To achieve that, all the pieces must be used, their plain sides must be turned down, and they must be interlocked without forcing until no holes remain. Those are among the rules that govern jigsaw-puzzle solutions.

If you are a scientist working today, you're literally solving a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone knows the solution. If you provide something that goes against the accepted solution, you will not be accepted.

But paradigm debates are not really about relative problem-solving ability, though for good reasons they are usually couched in those terms. Instead, the issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. A decision between alternate ways of practicing science is called for, and in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than on future promise... The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem solving.

This is hard for us to understand, but to be a true innovator, it's not that you come up with a new solution to a problem; it's that you must defy the basic premises of bureaucratic science.

He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.

This is why it's almost impossible to separate religion from science. If a new discovery is to be made, that person must believe that he is sent by God to tell us the truth. That's Galileo. If you actually met him, you would think he was a complete jerk. He was arrogant, obnoxious, and all he did was make fun of you. But he was driven by a divine mission to spread the truth. Because he created this conflict with the church, it became a national controversy and focused the attention of scientists, who then tried to resolve the issue. Scientific innovation and genius are not a tea party; they are a revolution.

The Double-Edged Sword of Bureaucratic Science

For most of history, science was part of religion. Science was about validating religion, but this creates a problem we call confirmation bias, meaning that we will only look at evidence that supports our claims. We do this every single day. We all want to be right, to feel good, and to be confirmed and validated by the world around us.

There's a famous experiment related to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Dunning and Kruger were two American psychologists who made their undergraduate students do two things. First, every student took an IQ test. Second, they asked each student how they thought they did on that test. It turned out that not one student predicted his or her class ranking correctly. Those who did really well, the top 5%, found it pretty easy, so they assumed it was easy for everyone and underestimated their performance by about 10%. Those who did the worst didn't really know what was asked of them, so they overestimated their performance. In fact, those who got it most wrong were the worst students. Maybe they were in the bottom 10% but thought they were average.

What this tells us is that doubt—self-doubt—is really the mark of genius. If you're able to doubt yourself, question yourself, and self-reflect, that's a sign of an excellent student.

The question then is, how do you bring doubt into science? You separate science from religion and create a bureaucracy around it to instill doubt in the scientific process. That's the solution proposed by Francis Bacon, and it is the most successful solution in human history. The process is: hypothesis -> experiment -> data analysis -> replication.

The beauty of this model is that you can make it into a bureaucracy. Each department does its own thing, inspecting and auditing the work of the previous department to make sure the results are accurate. It turns out if you do it this way, it's revolutionary, and it explains the world we live in today. It explains why scientific progress has been so fast and remarkable these past 300-400 years.

But embedded in this system are lots of other issues:

• Political Control: It takes a lot of resources to run the system, which allows politicians to come in and interfere with the science.
• Over-specialization: Over time, each department will over-specialize, meaning they are now unable to communicate with each other because their underlying assumptions and instruments are different and too complicated for others to understand.
• Lack of Accountability: How do you know if each department is doing a good job or not? You can't, because now they're over-specialized and aloof.
• Insularity and Gatekeeping: You have to spend 20 years in school before you can even enter the system. This insularity creates gatekeeping, which means that only if you play by the rules can you enter. As a result, you no longer have any creativity.

This is the great irony of science. Science was initiated and inspired by the genius of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, but today, science has developed to a point where it no longer welcomes them. Why? Because Galileo is an ass; he doesn't get along with other people. They wouldn't let him in. Newton is crazy; he's an alchemist who believes the Bible will reveal the end of the world. They won't let him in. Einstein is really bad at mathematics; he would fail all the tests required to get into the system. He probably would not get into graduate school today.

This is the world we live in. So don't worry about artificial intelligence, billionaires living forever, or nanotechnology. Worry about the fact that we've come to a point in our civilization where we are now incapable of innovation.

What are the chances Newton was right about the end of the world?

Why do we know that Newton predicted the end of the world? Newton didn't have any family—no wife, no children—so his entire estate was left to his nephews and nieces. He also left them a lot of money. These were aristocrats. Newton was actually the first commoner in English history to receive a state funeral and be buried at Westminster Abbey. Over time, his relatives became poor and sold off what was valuable. Newton's papers—all his notes—were auctioned off in the 1930s.

You would imagine that everyone would want these notes, but for whatever reason, they didn't sell very well. The auction was so bad that the notes were sold piecemeal. One person who bought them was the economist John Maynard Keynes. He was so excited to read the papers of Newton, thinking there must be so much mathematics that would lead to new discoveries. When he actually read the papers, he was absolutely aghast at what he discovered: it was alchemy and theology.

Newton was trying to read the Bible and look for a secret code that would tell him the future. He was convinced of the Second Coming, that Jesus would return, and he wanted to know when and how. I think he made the prediction of 2060, but what's more important is that he became what we call a Christian Zionist.

The idea of Christian Zionism is that once you predict the future and know when Jesus is returning, you want to know how he returns. Newton became convinced that for Jesus to return, certain conditions had to be met to facilitate it. One major condition was the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, which at this point was controlled by the Ottomans. He was convinced that we had to get all the world's Jews and return them to Jerusalem. The only problem was, the Jews didn't want to go back.

Newton is actually one of the founders of a movement called Christian Zionism. He was part of a secret society with John Locke and other important individuals who considered themselves the true church. In his notes, Newton was very clear: he thought the Holy Trinity was nonsense. There's only one God, and he was the representative of God on Earth, here on a divine mission. So he was part of this secret society trying to achieve Christian Zionism and discover when the Second Coming would happen.

Whether or not Newton is correct is not the issue. The issue is that with his power and influence, he was heavily promoting Christian Zionism in England. As we know, many of these people, these Christian Zionists, would go to America, believing that America was the New Jerusalem. Later on, these Christian Zionists would link up and plot to bring the Jews back to Jerusalem, which led to something called the Balfour Declaration. After World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated, the British Empire gave permission to all the Jews in the world to return to Jerusalem, whether they wanted to or not.

This is why history is so important. You cannot possibly understand what's happening in the Middle East today without first understanding all this history.

So, will the world end in 2060? That's not the issue. The issue is that there are very powerful people in this world who believe in this and who believe it is their divine mission to make this come true—to use their power, influence, and money to make this prediction a reality. It's not really a prophecy; it's a plan. How do we bring back Jesus? Because when Jesus returns, the world ends, and everyone's happy; heaven comes on Earth. Well, here's the plan: Christian Zionism. The fact that there are really powerful people of the stature of Isaac Newton, with almost unlimited resources and power, who actually believe in this and want to make it come true—that should be the major concern.