One of the most exciting things about life to me is the frequent discovery that the way I thought the world worked isn't, in fact, the way the world works. I find the revelation of just how mistaken I am to be thrilling. It implies that there is a fresher, better, more accurate, and more encompassing away of seeing the world. I have been given the gift of realizing that my old axioms, my old locked-in ways of understanding how things worked, were wrong. Usually I find that the way things work in biology, in science, in business, and in life is more intricate and involved, more subtle, and more open to change than I ever imagined. It's incredibly freeing.
It reminds me of the story behind the publication of Antonie Lavoisier's revolutionary book Traité élémentaire de chimie (Elements of Chimistry) in 1789. Lavoisier proposed that through rigorous experimentation one could derive basic principles:
It is a maxim universally admitted in geometry, and indeed in every branch of knowledge, that, in the progress of investigation, we should proceed knows facts to what is unknown…. In this manner, from a series of sensations, observations, and analyses, a successive train of ideads arises, so linked together, that an attentive observer may trace back to a certain point the order and connection of the whole sum of human knowldge.
Lavoisier theorized that there were basic chemical elements that could not be broken down. He argued that they formed the building blocks of matter. And so he rigorously began to seek them out. He's scientist who named oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, the person who discovered oxygen's role in combustion and respiration, who showed that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. He revolutionized the filed of chemistry. He created a whole new language to describe how the component parts of reality interact with each other. In other words, he descirbed anew how the world works. He was able to use the basic principles he set out to predict the existence of other elements that weren't discovered in his lifetime.
Before Lavoisier, chemists could only examine those chemicals that nature just happended to have left lying around. Lavoisier's idea was that instead of just limitting ourselves to those elements, why not experiment until we can find the entire universe of all possible chimical compunds, not just those that we conveniently stumble upon?
His ideas were stunning. The publication of his book became one of the great dividing lines in the history of science. Before Lavoisier, scientists and intellectuals assumed the world worked one way. After, it was understood that the world worked completely differently. Modern chemistry was born. The world had fundamentally shifted. Today, everything from the buttons on your shirt to the chill of your refrigerator to thi ink in this book or the very chips driving the device in your hands as you read these words is there only because of that discovery.
I love it when that kind of thing happens. When a new discovery fundamentally changes how we view and understand the world we live in. When everything we thought we knew is thrown into question, because of new information or new data. When the world was one way one day, and the next we have possibilities we weren't even capable of conceiving the day before.
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