Advances in the Telescope

Advances in the Telescope

The human race has always maintained a curiosity of the world around them. They have explored the depths of the ocean floor to the peak of Mt. Everest, but there has always been that drive for something more. That drive leads most curious eyes to the sky, with the thought of what lies beyond those sparkling stars. For centuries astronomers were unable to explore these outer reaches of space until the age of the Hubble telescope. The idea of the Hubble had been floating around since 1923, when Edwin Hubble first proposed the idea. By 1990 the idea was put into action when the Hubble was declared the first general observatory put into orbit. Since that time, the Hubble has enabled many new discoveries to be made, shaping and shifting society's current paradigms of the universe. Now, with the addition of two new instruments to the Hubble, astronomers can literally peer light years into the universe, to measures that were not possible before.

The term paradigm shift was first developed by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 when he published an article called "The Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery". It was not long after that the concept of a paradigm shift became widely accepted, too widely excepted as far as Kuhn was concerned. When Thomas Kuhn wrote the article, his intent was specific; he wanted the term to be used purely in a scientific manor. Well, just as nature makes its own path, society elected to do the same with the use of the term. Now the concept is applied to a vast realm of human experiences. But before things get too far along, one has to understand what a paradigm shift is. Let us start even more basic by defining a paradigm. A paradigm is a set of assumptions and values that shapes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them. Assuming that the definition of shift is understood, and then the concept of paradigm shift should be easy. In Kuhn's eyes a paradigm shift occurs in the midst of a scientific revolution when scientists encounter anomalies that cannot be explained by current paradigms to date. He argues that these anomalies which are encountered in every paradigm are being written off by scientists as errors instead of taking them into account. This could not be truer, but there does come a time when these anomalies or nature's failures to conform entirely to expectation, cannot be ignored. These are times when the current paradigm cannot explain the outcome of an event because the anomaly was too great. In Kuhn's article he uses the discovery of oxygen, electric currents, and X-rays to illustrate this issue. All three of these discoveries were stumbled upon, meaning that the outcome could not really be a paradigm because the results of the experiment were not planned or expected. Instead something new was discovered and therefore forced scientists to reshape a once known theory. This illustrates the meaning of a paradigm shift. Scientists, as well as society, are forced to change their paradigm of something that was thought to be known in order to conform to the outcome of the anomaly.

The Hubble Space Telescope is presenting a paradigm shift of its own due to the recent repair mission that will allow a recast for a new age of exploration. The basis for these repairs is due to multiple causes; age of the telescope, new technologies, etc. By making these repairs to such a large and versatile telescope it may allow astronomers to reset the cosmological zeitgeist for space explorations to come. That on its own may be a paradigm shifting, but there are more obvious ones. Since the day the Hubble Space telescope was put into orbit in 1990 by the Space Shuttle Discovery, it has represented a new paradigm shift in the sense that we can now view dark matter, planets, and even land contours. Today, those once new discoveries can be thought of as a paradigm; just as X-ray machines have become a paradigm in current society. However, there is a new paradigm shift taking effect in the Hubble Telescope. Since the disaster of the Columbia accident, which killed seven crew members during the re-entering of the earth's atmosphere, NASA has used the repair mission on the Hubble Space telescope as a stepping stone to getting back to Mars. Could this be a paradigm shift? Indeed, because of the anomaly that occurred causing the death of seven crew members, it has forced scientists to make upgrades and change the paradigm from what was thought to be safe space flight.

From a more technological or perhaps scientific view of the Hubble Telescope there is definitely a paradigm shift