Natural Sciences Essay

1266 Words3 Pages

Remember when it was published that Pluto is no longer considered as a planet? I remember that our physics teacher was really angry about the fact that in space agency discarded the fact that was known and generally accepted by the general public. In my essay I will discuss how the “old” knowledge was affected when there were new aspects of particular knowledge discovered. I will focus on two areas of knowledge: The natural sciences and the arts and I will ask myself: To what extend can new knowledge contributes to abundance of old, generally recognised facts? Today’s medicine fully understands how human blood circulation works. However in Ancient Greece people believed that blood was related to air, springtime and cheerful personality it was also believed that liver produces all of the blood. This belief was valid until William Harvey described blood circulation more or less on the same way that we know today. He added the critical experimental finding that blood is "pumped" around the body by the heart. This founding caused a chain reaction in medicine. New findings were discovered and that led to our current understanding of the medicine we know today. If you ask a random person how Greeks thought about blood circulation only few could answer that question right because this “old” knowledge was discarded as soon as new discovery appeared. That discovery caused a paradigm shift in the natural sciences. Not only in medicine but also in biology, chemistry and physics and that is basically what paradigm shifts are all about. Some paradigm is an overarching theory shared by community of scientists, which is used to make sense of some aspects of reality. A scientific revolution or paradigm shift takes place when scientists become... ... middle of paper ... ... previous knowledge critically in order to decide if that knowledge is really worth of abundance. Luckily there are some scientists who later discover that discarded knowledge and takes it as a basis for their further research (like in Leibniz – Einstein case) that helps to establish new aspects of knowledge. Works Cited • Wikipedia. "Blood." 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood#History (accessed 2 Feb 2014). • Planetseed.com. "Medicine and the Scientific Revolution | History of Medicine | PlanetSEED." 2014. http://www.planetseed.com/relatedarticle/rise-scientific-medicine-scientific-revolution (accessed 2 Feb 2014). • Lagemaat, Richard Van De. Theory of knowledge for the IB Diploma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. • Wikipedia. "Movie theater." 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater#Spelling_and_alternative_terms (accessed 2 Feb 2014).

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