Lost Secrets of the Universe
Observational Fossils.—Given that a lone contemporary (or even predecessor) of Copernicus could have formulated heliocentricism with evidence then available, and that this discovery might have gone entirely unnoticed, we could frame another speculative scenario in which the lost and re-discovered astronomical work contained some innovation not known to Copernicus, and possibly not even known to us. In this scenario, the lost and re-discovered manuscript is not a mere historical curiosity, but a striking and perhaps even revolutionary contribution to thought. We have long passed the point where ancient observations could force any revision in our scientific theories, so we can rule out the possibility of any contribution in the form of improved techniques or technologies of observation. However, the discovery of an observation since lost or forgotten, like the lunar observations on 18 June 1178 recorded by Gervase of Canterbury, postulated to have been the impact that formed the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon, might make us aware of something we didn’t otherwise know about, which can then be assimilated not only into contemporary knowledge, but also the observations themselves can be assessed from the perspective of contemporary methodology. Precisely because we do subject such observations to contemporary critique, the further any observations recede into the past, the more likely they are to be questioned and the less compelling the evidence appears. The 1178 observations remain controversial because of the vernacular in which they were described and the lack of confirmation from independent sources. Such observations can be theoretically fruitful in the sense that they pose a problem for the explanation of what exactly was observed. Past observations, then, can be of some value, but can we say the same for theory? Can we make a clean distinction between observation and theory that would allow for theory to remain viable even as observation becomes problematic? Could any past theoretical innovation be valuable to contemporary science, so that some long lost manuscript contained unknown secrets of the cosmos? While for the purposes of philosophy of science we may want to distinguish observational and theoretical terms, in practice observation and theory are tightly-coupled: observations drive theory and theory drives further observation. This means that the increased precision of observation drives increased precision in theory, and both are carried forward together by increased precision of measurement. Once the error bars of measurement exceed the observational parameters of past theory, both observation and theory of two distinct periods of human knowledge increasingly diverge, and their relevance to each other declines. This may be one mechanism of paradigm shift, but it’s not only such mechanism.
