Unlike the seemingly smooth gradual biological evolution by natural selection, the idea of scientific progress proceeds by abrupt steps of discontinuity. Anticipations can be found in ancient or medieval thinking, sometimes in the form of implicit denials, but in explicit formulation is almost an emerging modernized never-thought-of idea, successfully but not completely replacing what is old by what is new with remaining minimal connectivity. It is not simply more discussions of realized progress, it affects many other ideas which are not classified as modern scientific thoughts, like a caveman adorning Wall Street’s business suit. In a nutshell, scientific progress is almost always marked by certain immediate reconstructions of previously accepted ideas that by traditional point of view is called business-as-usual normal science or textbook science whose progress is monitored by the accumulated data of the same facts derived from the same ideas but disguise in different colorful appearances like repackaged wrappings of the same contents. These reconstructions are called paradigm shifts by Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) as found in his 1963 series of essays on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

Prominently, six of the many historically notable paradigm shifts are: (1) Copernican heliocentric universe, (2) Newtonian physics, (3) Maxwell’s continuous fields, (4) Planck’s energy quantization, (5) Einstein’s relativities, and (6) Dirac’s quantum field theory of the electromagnetic radiation, Quantum ElectroDynamics (QED). The Copernican shift was subsequently improved by both Kepler and Galileo before Newton created its mathematical foundation of instantaneous action-at-a-distance for a deterministic clockwork universe. Maxwell replaced action-at-a-distance with the physical reality of Faraday’s field lines of forces agreeing with the conservation of total mechanical energy. In 1900, Planck solved the mystery of continuous blackbody radiation by proposing the existence of energy packets for both absorption and emission. In 1905, Einstein shifted the independent existence of absolute space and time into a joint concept of space-time. Then Dirac used this space-time gauge invariance to create QED leading to other successful gauge theories: Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD) and the Standard Model of elementary particles. A logical consequence of both QED and QCD would be the quantization of the space-time continuum by the integrability of infinitesimal squares of zero-point energies. The feasibility of cold fusion by extracting energy from the quantum vacuum would further vindicate the reality of quantum vacuum fluctuations as space-time quantization.