A whole new understanding takes hold

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday November 24th, 2008

Are you familiar with the term "paradigm shift"?

The term was first coined back in 1962, in a book called "The Structure of Scientific Revolution," written by Thomas Kuhn. He argued that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions," and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

Things change quickly and permanently. Think of a paradigm shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis.

I know, this is not easy to grasp and unfortunately I am going to complicate it further in a minute. Right now let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Primitive society was changed completely by agriculture. The first peoples existed for centuries roaming the Earth constantly hunting and gathering for seasonal foods and water. However, by 2000 BC, Middle America was a landscape of very small villages, each surrounded by patchy fields of corn, beans and squash. There was no turning back.

Here is the thing; we are in the midst of another scientific paradigm shift that is changing the way we are going to see everything. It is a shift that comes to us from the world of quantum physics and is best illustrated through chaos theory.

So, what we first have to wrap our head around is the fact that chaos does not really mean that something is out of control. What chaos theory really says, in its simplest form, is that no matter how random it seems, order will emerge.

Quantum physics changes what we have thought for the last 350 odd years, ever since Newton defined the world as a well-oiled machine.

Here is how the world used to work, you could predict it. Throw a ball in the air and it will fall back down; add heat and you convert something to gas; trip and you are going to fall down. Isaac Newton said we have to believe in cause and effect.

But what if it is less about scientific rules, and more about the way things interact?

The thing about quantum physics is that it does not focus on the way things work; rather, it looks at the way things relate. It turns out the world does not so much resemble a machine as it does a living organism.

And because it is alive, there is a whole lot of chaos, just like life. Things cannot always be predicted.

Think about it, you plan to go out for the evening and get the stomach flu; or the perfect vacation ends up to be filled with rainy days; no matter how hard we try to predict what is going to happen to us tomorrow, everything can change.

But, when things change, something new emerges. We get sick and spoil the perfect date with our spouse, and they make us soup and put us to bed and rush out to buy some Tylenol and show us that they love us in a hundred deeper and more real ways then the dinner would ever have accomplished.

There is a new order that emerges in the chaos.

There was an experiment conducted in 1987 by Craig Reynolds in which bird like objects called "boids" were created to simulate bird flight. They were given three simple rules: fly in the direction of other objects, try to match velocity with neighbouring boids, and avoid bumping into things.

Now here is the thing that should not have happened: the boids flew in formation and when they broke apart to avoid bumping into objects they soon regrouped into a new formation even though they were not programmed to do this at all.

So what chaos theory suggests is that because the world is continually evolving and organizing itself in new ways, if you set a group of people in motion, each one following the right set of three or four simple rules, they will spontaneously self-organize into something complex and unexpected.

There is another interesting example of this in which a junior high school decided it would just have three rules. So all the teachers and students got together and decided they would all agree to this: "take care of yourself", "take care of each other" and "take care of this place."

These rules may seem simple and common sense; but when it comes right down to it, if you followed them everything would work out. How you chose to live out those rules would develop into new patterns of behaviour.

Okay, if you have read this far; thank you. I realize that even quantum physicists' eyes glaze over after about 15 minutes of this stuff. But I really do have a point; and it is this: the world is changing.

Yes, you know. I know. But do you really know?

Do you realize that kids today think e-mail is a slow and old fashioned way to communicate?
Do you realize that learning no longer means retention of facts, but rather it means acquiring research and communication skills?

Do you realize that most of what we held to be true and inviolate is actually just a working theory, and probably wrong?

Do you realize that out of the chaos we tend to create the world will adapt and find new ways to exist?

That is a paradigm shift, and we need to get on board.

Because from everything we are learning about reality, it is never going to go back to the way things were, and the future is not going to be what we predict.