Technology Prior Knowledge

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In the explosion of cosmological ideas, it's a difficult battle to decide whether the advancements are made specifically from prior knowledge, technology or simply both. In the case of Werner Heisenberg, he explained “Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning” (Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 1958). He has a point that prior knowledge helps to create better informed hypotheses and better planned experiments; however, without advancements in technology we might still be significantly behind in all we have discovered thus far. This is why I believe that there is a middle ground in the recent developments …show more content…

The issues with prior knowledge alone has to do with the problems of trying to prove a theory that is simply “here say”. For instance, before the telescope created in 1609, the idea that the universe was geocentric was a long standing theory. If modern technology that is available today might have been available earlier we would not have had to waste so much time on determining attributes such as a heliocentric model, the problem with the planets, or the question of the basic building blocks. Many technological developments include evidence found for the universes expansion, evidence that would support the Bing Bang Theory, and greater telescopes. For the expansion of the universe Hubble used the technology of The Doppler Effect to determine the redshift effect which gave proof the universe was “speeding away”. Tom Siegfried of ScienceNews.org states: “Hubble, using data collected by Vesto Slipher and Milton Humason, published the definitive analysis establishing that the cosmos actually is growing bigger” (Siegfried, Cosmological Discoveries, 2014); this discovery broke the concept of the unchanging and eternal universe that has been around since the days of Aristotle. The Big Bang Theory has been a difficult topic to prove being that there has been no significant evidence; however, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation might have the answer to a theory that needs to be tested. When Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson first discovered this advancement it came as an accident in 1964. This happened specifically because the two realized there was static everywhere in space. Siegfried states, “That static was the echo of the birth of the universe, literally the smoke from the Big Bang gun, in the form of microwaves” (Siegfried, Cosmological Discoveries, 2014). Also, the advancements in telescopes were because of Joseph Fraunhofer who made advancements in

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