ABOUT CONSERVATIVE NATURE OF PEOPLE OR WHY WE DON´T
LIKE NEW THINGS
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has
brought progress. - Charles Kettering
Yes, it is true that people do not like change and you can
get proof of it everywhere around, in any area, from children´s
behavior to science.
For example, look at the life of Afred Wegener, (1880-1930),
a German climatologist and geophysicist, who in 1915 published
an expanded version of his 1912 book The Origin of Continents
and Oceans. This work was one of the first to suggest continental
drift and plate tectonics. He suggested that a supercontinent,
he called Pangaea, had existed in the past, then broke up
starting 200 million years ago, and the pieces of it "drifted"
to their present positions. He cited the fit of South America
and Africa, as proof, ancient climate similarities, fossil
evidence (such as the fern Glossopteris and Mesosaurus), and
similarity of rock structures. The book was translated to
English in 1924, when it aroused hostile criticism. The proposal
remained controversial until the 60-ies (Eric Weisstein, March
11, 1996). *
In the article "The Meteorologist Who Started a Revolution"
(by Patrick Hughes)** you can find several examples of a hostile
reception of Alfred Wegener´s ideas by scientific community.
"Utter, damned rot!" said the president of the
prestigious American Philosophical Society. "If we are
to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we
have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again,"
said another American scientist.
Anyone who "valued his reputation for scientific sanity"
would never dare support such a theory, said a British geologist.
Thus most in the scientific community ridicule the concept
that would have revolutionized the earth sciences and reviled
the man who dared to propose it, a German meteorological pioneer
and polar explorer, Alfred Wegener. Science historians compare
his story with the tribulations of Galileo.
"It only took 60+ years for the Academy of Sciences
who drummed him out of the Academy for his crazy theory of
tectonic plates to realize he was right" (Ozzie Gontang.)***
This attitude continues to be a topic for discussions up
to date. It goes into every area of life where new ideas arise.
The freshest example could be found on a recent TV show "American
Inventor" where Joe Sparks, Pose Tech coach Level 2 from
Toledo, Ohio, presented his invention, an "EzRun"
belt, which allows a runner to learn good running technique
faster and easier. A video clip of this show is on our website.
Not surprisingly, looking back to history, he got a negative
reception from American inventors, who are supposed to be
the ones supporting inventions.
Well, human history continues in the same way as always,
human nature doesn´t change, it resists to anything
new, innovative, and going against the establishment. The
question is: should it always be this way or should we try
to manage it somehow on our way to the future? So far nobody
invented anything to help us overcome this "tradition".
Sometimes innovators devoted their whole lives to struggle
for their ideas to be accepted and they did not always succeed.
The main problem is that people do not want to change their
present state of the mind, because it safe, secure, and stable.
Is it supposed to be this way, because there is no other
way around? It is a good question. Obviously, we can´t
just ask people be open-minded. It will not work. So far,
not too many things were invented with a full support of society.
Even the most obvious things, such as cars and computers had
been first accepted negatively. And those came at the time
when people needed these inventions as a next logical step
towards the progress. So there is always a gap between what
people need and what they understand about it. There should
be some kind of common sense, maturity of the mind in people
to be able to mentally accept these things positively.
So, the society as a whole should be ready for these things
to be accepted. But how does it actually happen is not known
yet. There are lots of attempts to find this out, but we don´t
have any answer yet. We know one thing for sure that it is
about people´s perception, which changes the state of
mind. No doubt, we can teach people to perceive new things
in a different way. So education could be a solution. Then
we need to develop an educational system based on people´s
needs, even if they don´t know about them yet.
Dr.Romanov
Pose
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