The Perception of History as a Science

 

Considering what we can learn about time, we can make several conclusions about the perception of history.

    The history that we study is not limited to human history, but is extends to time in general, which is restricted only by the age of the universe.   History can be graphed on a timeline, but that kind of visualization can only go as far as the mind's perception of it.  If you say that the distance between 2000 B.C.E. and the present is a distance of 20 centimeters on a timeline, that is your decision to perceive history in the length.

    By using a specifically scientific perspective, it is possible to see history as a dynamic, relative process in which one small force can affect an entire system. A metaphor for this is a drop of sand in an hourglass can precipitate an entire web of fluidly related events. One popular explanation for such a process is the chaos theory, which states that long term changes in a dynamic linear system are sensitive to small initial actions and differences.

    A historical example of this would be the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 by Serbian rebels. Austria-Hungary subsequently declared war on Serbia, and one by one most of the major European powers joined two warring alliances, beginning World War One. Indeed, this is a chain of events, but beyond the surface, the assassination sparked a web of events rooted both in the past and the present that had yet to come.

 

    This graphic doesn't show the whole story. We can easily say that a web of events should be three dimensional. If the conventional view of time is inaccurate, and history is based on our perception of spacetime, then we can no longer describe history as simply a series of "cause and effect" events. History in this sense is related to how time works in a physical sense. This is the science of history.

Going back to the graphic, we can add the fourth dimension to account for the relatively of time. As you can see, the arrows of the web are depicted differently this time. This is to show that perception of events and thus history in general is relative.

 

Going back to the graphic, we can add the fourth dimension to account for the relatively of time. As you can see, the arrows of the web are depicted differently this time. This is to show that perception of events and thus history in general is relative.

Two events a millennium apart can be perceived as right next to each other, and two other events a day apart can be thought as centuries away from each other. We can perceive that the fall of the Roman Empire, which fragmented Europe and eventually led to the rise of nation-states  caused Adolf Hitler to take the reins of the German nation, while keeping all the events and processes in between in the background. In addition, the bursting of the internet bubble and President Bill Clinton's Lewinsky scandal occurred within the same few year, but we can perceive them as connected only through a point thousands of years in the past, from which the trends and processes that respectively caused them diverged.

 

    History may be the study of the past, but the study itself changes just like any other . There are always new methods of perceiving, just as we have been describing right here. The perception of history as a science may seem odd, but so are other new ideas that have appeared in the field. After all, we can all change our perceptions of spacetime, and suddenly seeing history as a science makes a lot more sense.