The Power of Seeing What Is False
El poder de ver lo que es falso
A reflection on how genuine breakthroughs arise not from accumulating knowledge, but from recognizing and questioning unexamined assumptions.
The Power of Seeing What Is False
A reflection on how genuine breakthroughs arise not from accumulating knowledge, but from recognizing and questioning unexamined assumptions.
People in every field will instinctively operate this way. The greatest scientists operate this way. They do not operate from knowing. They learn, and they are curious, but they operate from seeing what is potentially false, looking at what could be false and trying to understand more deeply.
Questioning unsubstantiated assumptions
Consider the breakthroughs in physics at the turn of the last century. They came because a very young scientist could see the beliefs embedded in the physics of his time, beliefs for which he could find no evidence. He saw the assumptions in physics that were purely unsubstantiated. All he had to do was say: what if I assume these are false? What would be a better explanation for the whole thing if, instead of building upon the assumption that this is real, I remove that assumption and import the insights of a deeper understanding of reality?
I am speaking about time and space, which up until then were believed to be absolutely real things, and two separate things in a sense. There was space as an absolutely real thing, and then time as another. Things in space operated through time, and both were considered absolutely real, no matter where one was, for everything in the universe. But this young scientist recognized that there were a lot of assumptions going on. What if time is not an absolute? What if space is not an absolute? What if they are not separate? From those questions came the theory of relativity and all the breakthroughs of the last hundred years of physics.
Where even the innovator stopped
Then, however, this same scientist ran into beliefs of his own, and that is where he stopped innovating. There were convictions he could not let go of, and so the inquiry reached its limit.
The point is this: he innovated because he knew he did not know something, while others around him thought they did know. They believed their assumptions were truth. But that is all they were: assumptions.