Word: stent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...felt. Heisenberg has recently used it to argue against constructing even bigger (and more expensive) atom smashers on the ground that little more of a fundamental nature can be learned of the sub-nuclear world. In his controversial book The Coming of the Gold en Age, Molecular Biologist Gunther Stent brashly assumes that all basic questions in his field are either solved or close to solution. He also thinks that all scientific progress is fast approaching the point of diminishing returns. Man will never know how the universe began or what is the most fundamental of atomic particles, he says...
Heisenberg's and Stent's pessimistic prophecies are widely disputed. Many scientists, in fact, see very drastic changes on the horizon. They frequently invoke a model of scientific advance proposed by Historian Thomas Kuhn, who argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is not cumulative, but that it collapses and is rebuilt after each major conceptual shift. Paradigms is the word he uses for those overreaching models and theories according to which each new era of science conducts its normal, day-to-day operations. Copernicus, for example, established a new paradigm of science with his heliocentric...
...general satis faction of scientists that certain "endowed" individuals can trans mit messages from one to another (telepathy), predict events (precognition) or control an object by their mental powers (psychokinesis), scientists would still ask, How did they do it? What mysterious powers lurk inside them? In short, says Gunther Stent in a recent article in Scientific American, there would have to be some revolutionary new paradigm to explain what now seems to be a complete breach of elementary physical laws...