sketch of Hawes on Gould

[Chuck Grimes]

``...It seems utterly silly to me, anyhow, to call Einstein's
'overturning' of Newtonian gravity a paradigm shift -- that
overturning occurred well within the house of physics. All of the
"paradigm shifts" that make much sense are not shifts within a given
physical or natural science but the "shift" constituted by the very
origin of such science...'' Carrol Cox

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I am already late for work, so a little later won't be much
worse. Regardless of whether you use paradigm shift as a
characterization or not, I think E's re-construction of gravitation
not as a isolatable force of matter, but as the fundamental geometry
of space-time was profound. Not that my opinion means much, but I
think it was actually a bigger deal than Newton's re-construction of
gravity as an inverse square of distance law. Galileo already put
together the acceleration part of the gravity law, but he didn't
realize it varied with distance---he thought it was continuously
increasing everywhere. Newton gave the variance with distance---that
it actually drops off with increased distance. E turned the entire
idea of force into a geometric feature of spacetime---that's big part
of the big deal over E and general relativity.

Anyway, I think Hawkes is probably mostly right, that Gould probably
did open the door to external (non-biological) causative factors, and
this possibility does annoy biologists.

gotta go..

Chuck Grimes