When Europeans first visited China, its society made no sense to their colonial mindset, as the constant bowing seemed unnecessary and the importance of face wasn’t appreciated. Only when social scientists began to think in Chinese terms did they understand that in China, the group creates the individual, not the other way round. The scientific method that led to this discovery was grounded theory, which as the name implies, is to gather data first then theorize about it. Scientists in new cultures learned to watch, listen, and record events, and only then form a theory to explain them, to be tested the next day. This process was repeated until they understood the culture.
Using data to develop theory avoided colonial bias but seemed to reverse normal science, but then Kuhn discovered that science has two aspects (Kuhn, 1970):
1. Paradigm growth: Theory predicts data.
2. Paradigm shift: Data produces new theory.
In paradigm growth, theory leads to new data, but in paradigm shifts, data leads to new theories. The first is normal science that progresses gradually, as water wears away rock, but paradigm shifts are more like earthquakes that radically change the landscape. For example, the shift from Galen’s theory of miasma to a germ theory of disease was an intellectual earthquake that sunk one theory and raised another. In the history of science, when traditional theories stagnate, a paradigm shift has to raise a new theory from the data ground to progress. In Figure 2.14, science can connect data and theory in either direction, to predict data from theory, or to deduce theory from data. Both ways are scientific because both connect data and theory to increase understanding.
The approach proposed is grounded physics, the application of grounded theory to physical events. The aim is to understand quantum reality on its own terms, as waves not particles. It means looking at reality in a new way, not as what we see, but as what causes it. Some worry this will be the end of physics but as Kant concluded, we see phenomena not noumena (things as they really are) (Kant, 2002). If materialism is an assumption, not a fact, abandoning it isn’t the end of physics but a new beginning, or as Kuhn says, a paradigm shift.