Although Platos Allegory of the Cave in book seven of The Republic is nearly 2,500 years old, it speaks volumes of our own age. Socrates was most often the protagonist in Platos stories, and in this one he describes beings living in a cave such that it reads remarkably like a modern movie theater. Socrates wants us to imagine what it would be like for the inhabitants having never known any other existence from birth. They are chained to the floor in a seated position facing the back wall of the cave, on which are cast shadows from an artificial light source above and behind the occupants. Of course the chains, cave and artificial light are literary devices that we can think of as the modern technologies we seem unable to escape in our daily lives. Having known nothing else, it is through our science and technologies that we experience the universe. Even when we step outside and smell the morning air and watch a sunrise and sunset we experience these things through the conventional wisdom of our age. It is that conventional wisdom that constitutes the cave, not our perception of the physical world around us. Both Ptolemy and Copernicus could be thought to stand side by side, yet they would each see entirely different phenomena in a simple sunrise or sunset. One would say the earth goes around the sun, while the other would say the sun goes around the earth. Yet both would be looking from precisely the same vantage point. As obvious as the heliocentric model may seem to us today, it was a subject of controversy for centuries that ultimately had to be resolved by the correspondence principle: Ptolemys earth-centered model worked beautifully for 15 centuries and was used in map-making and the navigation of sailing vessels. Despite having been wrong it worked. But in order to make sense of the motions of the planets and stars EVERYTHING had to move on its own epicycle - an orbit within an orbit. Copernicus found that by merely assuming that the earth revolved around the sun he could make all of those epicycles disappear. So he replaced 90 assumptions in favor of just a single assumption, in keeping with Occams razor (Principle of Parsimony). And that was one mans first foot out of the cave in which all previous generations had been living.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 14:25:21 +0000
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