No doubt, for a while at least, very little will change. Whole fields of knowledge – not to mention university chairs and departments, scientific journals, prestigious research grants, libraries, databases, school curricula and the like – have been designed to fit the old structures and the old questions. Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even. We
...more
