If I say that science has no history that does not mean, that there were scientists following each other in time. That should be (???) unquestionable. What I want to say is, that scientific meme complex is ahistorical. What we sometimes see as one philosophy (which is in fact science in the same way as science is philosophy) opposing another and declaring itself as an advancement in comparison to previous - in in fact nothing else but multiverse (another word for meme complex - in the meme field) bubbling philosophical correlates on it’s surface as emergent properties of a meme space that is an integral and confined in time and space with the same limits as physical parts of that part of multiverse that we can observe.
Let me give an example. This is a part of a New Scientist article (4 June 2011, Theory of everything from Michael Duff, ) :
In 1998, Juan Maldacena, also of the Institute for Advanced Study, used membranes to explore what would happen inside a hypothetical universe with many dimensions of space and gravity. He showed that everything happening on the boundary of such a universe is equivalent to everything happening inside it: ordinary particles interacting on the boundary’s surface correspond precisely to how membranes interact on the interior. When two mathematical approaches describe the same physics in this way, we call it a duality.
It is almost impossible no to recognize that these words were written by Plato almost 2500 years ago. What happens on the surface (shadow in the cave) is just a reflection of events on the interior. That Plato’s shadow is nothing but emergent property - and duality is nothing but dualism that was introduced by Plato. Seeing from this perspective all history of science is a constant struggle against dualism, which proves to be futile. It should be clear that the idea to develop a unifying theory of everything is necessary fuels for scientists; but at the same time idea, that is completely wrong. It is an oscillation that is developed between so called materialism and dualism that is producing results. Oscillation between General relativity and quantum mechanics is producing new insights - but each insight is as far from unifying theory as previous one.
