The history of science is WHOA

Today I led a discussion in my Honors class about Copernicus, focusing on how he presented his work. Most of it centered on how thoroughly he covered his butt in presenting his then-controversial idea that the earth revolved around the sun. "Buy, read, and enjoy," anyone? To quote William Hartnell, "Sheer poetry!"
But the best part happened before class, when I had an epiphany and tried to explain it to a biology major who was polite enough to tell me it worked. My idea was this: the history of science is cyclical.

Take evolution, for example: in high school biology, I learned about a guy named Lamarck, who thought that animals could pass on acquired characteristics to their offspring (for example, a man who works out a lot will have children who are more muscular). By the time I learned this, however, Lamarck had been pretty thoroughly debunked; all I really learned was that Lamarck was wrong; end of story. Last month, though, I learned about a relatively fresh topic in biology: epigenetics (SciShow video here). In a nutshell, you can pass certain acquired genetic markers on to your offspring. (But please watch the video; Hank Green makes it much more fun than that.)
So Lamarck was right, but at a level that didn't exist when he came up with his theory. Meanwhile, his ideas had been discredited, discarded, then come back to and found to make sense in a new paradigm.

This has happened in physics too: look at our model of the atom. Once upon a time, it was a "plum pudding" with negatively charged electrons suspended in a cloud of positive charge. Then this was thrown out completely in favor of the Bohr model, which resembles the solar system: positively-charged nucleus orbited by electrons. Now the cloud-type model is favored again, but in reverse: quantum theory requires the atom to be a nucleus in a cloud of negative charge. That's pretty awesome.

I can even, though this may be a stretch, tie this back to Copernicus: he began the revolution that moved the Earth away from its comfortable stationary place at the center of the universe. For centuries we thought that was that, because it made mathematical sense. Then Einstein came along, and discovered that relativistic equations require a frame of reference that is stationary from the point of view of the observer. For most of us, this is the surface of the earth, in relation to trains, spaceships, the tops of buildings, etc. So once again, the earth can be considered stationary when it needs to be.

And you know what? This is why I love my liberal education. It allows me to step outside the boundary of any one discipline, and see the patterns that run through everything. History repeats itself, and all I can say is whoa.
DFTBA y'all!