UFOs - Leslie Kean [154]
Gradually, science will sort out the wheat from the chaff, and devise a way to integrate the so far unorganized UFO data into its own framework. Specific steps to be taken have been suggested by some concerned scientists, but lie outside the scope of this book. However, radical changes to the accepted scientific norm—anything leading to profound shifts in understanding—have never come about easily. UFOs seem to be the first to challenge something as fundamental as our anthropocentric, or human-centered, worldview, which could mean that resistance to studying them may turn out to be the longest in human history.
As defined by the philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn, author of the classic 1962 study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the process of a paradigm shift begins when a persistent anomaly is discovered that can’t be explained by the existing set of assumptions within the current scientific framework. The unexplained phenomenon undermines the foundational tenets of the prevailing worldview. When the anomaly first shows itself, its implications and physical characteristics seem absolutely inconceivable, totally outside the boundary of what could be real, thereby requiring dismissal by the establishment. At first its presence is rejected as an error and often ridiculed, with proponents of its legitimacy scorned and persecuted, their jobs and reputations at risk. As evidence mounts and it can no longer be discarded, attempts are made to incorporate it and define it within the parameters of the existing paradigm. The threat to current understanding is heightened and the establishment clings ever tighter to its self-defining, and self-defined, reality, as if confronted with death. At the same time, as Kuhn describes it, the old paradigm boundaries begin to soften, and a few highly placed scientists start exploring the study of the anomaly, gradually attracting additional researchers into the fold. Finally, the new reality breaks through, often suddenly and quickly, sometimes precipitated by the efforts of a single scientist acting at a crucial time. The anomaly then becomes part of the expected and we’re able to see nature in a new way, and soon the once-radical discovery becomes part of the known.
Kuhn writes: “A scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one … the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.”
With regard to the anomaly of the UFO, it’s easy to recognize its potential to create a “paradigm shift,” depending on what is discovered once science decides to recognize it. Because of the extraterrestrial possibility—a challenge to our understanding of the physical universe and our place in it—there is, indeed, a risk of a very large scientific revolution. If the UFO is determined to be a secret technological creation of mankind or something more complex such as a manifestation of nature from perhaps another dimension, the discovery would be potentially transformative. And Kuhn says it can all happen due to one defining, “noncumulative” event—perhaps one pivotal, lengthy UFO display, a new type of explosive physical evidence, or even communication via radio waves or other more advanced means—an event that will leave scientists certain as to the nature and origin of the phenomenon.
Unfortunately, history shows that such change usually progresses slowly in the buildup to that defining moment. Based on scientific observations in the early sixteenth century, Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, according to which the Earth was not stationary