Changes

|Topic=Mechanism of Scientific Inertia|Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan,|Formulated Year=2015|Description====The First Law for Theories===following passage from [[File:The First Law for Theories Barseghyan (2015.jpg)|center|600px]] An accepted [[theory''The Laws of Scientific Change'']] is not rejected unless there is a suitable replacement, even though sometimes that replacement may simply be summarizes the negation gist of the theory. For example, Issac Newtonlaw:<blockquote>According to ''s theory of universal gravitation produced small errors in predicting the movements of the planet Mercury.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 125]] Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuryfirst law'', it was noted that predictions any element of the time when the disk mosaic of Mercury would appear accepted theories and employed methods remains in transit across the sun's disk were off, sometimes mosaic except insofar as it is overthrown by hours, another element or even as much as a dayelements. These anomalies caught Basically, the law assumes that there is certain inertia in the attention of scientific mosaic: once in the French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Leverriermosaic, who proposed an explanation consistent with Newton's theory elements remain in 1859. Mercury, he supposed, was being perturbed the mosaic until they get replaced by the gravitational pull of an unknown planet orbiting closer to the sun. The hypothetical planet, named Vulcan, was searched for, but never found.[[CiteRef::Fontenrose (1973)]] Newton's theory had other predictive failures as well, but these did not lead to the rejection of the theoryelements. It was not rejected until after 1915, when Albert Einstein showed that Mercuryis reasonable therefore to call it ''s movements could be explained by his new theory of gravity, the general theory law of relativityscientific inertia''.[[CiteRef::Clark Barseghyan (19712015)]]===The First Law for Methods===[[File: The First Law for Methods Barseghyan 2015|p.jpg|center|600px]]Formulated for [[method123]]s, the first law states that the implicit expectations employed in theory assessment will continue to be employed until they are replaced by some alternate expectations.</blockquote>

|Prehistory=The logic behind first law of scientific change is somewhat similar comparable to that behind Newton's first law of motion. It identifies a 'null case' in which no outside forces are acting and therefore, nothing changes.

The idea that scientific changes occur only when an alternative is available was not stated in the form of a law prior to Barseghyan's ''Laws of Scientific Change''[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)]], but the idea is implicit in past concepts of scientific change. Although Karl Popper stressed the importance of empirical falsification in his view of scientific theories, he did not believe a theory with falsifying instances should be abandoned unless a better substitute was available .[[CiteRef::Thornton (2016)]]. "In most cases", he wrote, "before falsifying a hypothesis we have another one up our sleeve".[[CiteRef::Popper (1959)]]

Thomas Kuhn wrote of paradigms,[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)]], or later of a disciplinary matrix,[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1977a)]], as the set of shared commitments held by members of a scientific community, including theories, concepts, and methods. What Kuhn called normal science was the task of expanding the range of phenomena that could be explained in terms of the paradigm. He believed that this task seldom produced major novelties. The opportunity for fundamental change arose only during a crisis produced by the accumulation of anomalous findings that resisted explanation in the terms of the paradigm. Kuhn wrote that "falsification, though it surely occurs, does not happen with, or simply because of, the emergence of an anomaly or falsifying instance. Instead... it consists in the triumph of a new paradigm over the old one".[[CiteRef::Kuhn (1962a)|p. 147]]