The first major, and probably the most well known, paradigm shift in humanity's view of reality was our acceptance of Copernicus' heliocentric theory - that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not vice-versa. Another well known "reality revolution" was that wrought by Einstein in his Special and General theories of Relativity, which popularized the notion that there are aspects of reality that defy our intuition. For example, he extrapolated that a person traveling close to the speed of light would actually age slower than a person walking slowly down the sidewalk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation). This phenomenon of "time dilation" has been confirmed experimentally in multiple contexts.
Our generation's reality revolution really began back in 1900 with the birth of Quantum Mechanics and modern neuroscience. Over the last century, scientists have shown that our basic, intuition-guided assumptions about the world and how we percieve it, derived from our limited experience in what Richard Dawkins calls "middle-world" (the world of middle sizes, speeds and energies) are grossly misleading. Here is a brief example of one of the intuition crushing facts that quantum mechanics proved to us about reality:
In the famous "Double-Slit Experiment", a beam of light is passed through a barrier that has two tiny slits spaced closely apart. Behind this barrier is a screen that records the path of the light.
When light passes through one slit, it can either constructively or destructively interfere with light coming from the other slit, resulting in, respectively, a bright spot or a dark spot on the screen behind the barrier. What results is a predictable pattern of bright and dark spots along the length of the screen. Here's the catch. Instead of light, this same experiment can be done with a beam of matter, such as electrons. The intensity of the beam can be reduced so that we know only one electron at a time passes through the barrier, through one of the two slits. Amazingly, when the Double-Slit Experiment is performed with just one electron, we get the same interference pattern of light and dark spots! Now you should be asking yourself, "if there is only one electron, and it is passing through only one of the two slits, what is it interacting with to produce the interference pattern?" The answer: THE ELECTRON ACTUALLY PASSES THROUGH BOTH SLITS AT THE SAME TIME AND INTERACTS WITH ITSELF! If that's not weird enough, the other groundbreaking implication of this experiment was that it showed that particles of matter actually have a wave-like nature. Even humans have a wave-like nature to our movement, but it is much too small to notice because we are so massive.
Point being, our understanding of reality is becoming more and more distant from our intuition. If one is to truly comprehend the human experience, knowledge of these new scientific findings is a must.
Point being, our understanding of reality is becoming more and more distant from our intuition. If one is to truly comprehend the human experience, knowledge of these new scientific findings is a must.
