A Wrong Turn
A Wrong Turn
"Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws. A purely random set of accidents."
Marvin Minsky
‘Name a year which changed the world’- on the surface a very simple question with a whole range of answers to choose from. History is filled with great events the most obvious are battles, but there are also the birth of ideas and inventions which have revolutionised the way we live our lives today. However, to pick one out and to say that is any more significant than the countless other events in history would seem a crime. Thus, the idea of history being a set of ‘Great Causes’ holds very little weight for me. By saying so one would be implying that history is merely a set of great events and anything else that happened had no effect on our world today. This quite clearly cannot be true.
Furthermore, the idea that one event or year which alone changed the world is ludicrous. For an event to change the world it needs to be the sole effect on absolutely every thing in the world; it needs to make every event that happened before it effectively forgotten and insignificant to the people of this new world – a tall task for one action. Thus for an event to change the world it needs to be the beginning of a world – almost an impossibility.
However, imagine this event could happen; for it to single handily change the world it would need to have no root causes otherwise it would not be a single event which changed the world, it could be easily argued that it was not the start of everything in the world as it had a cause. So this event has to be causeless and spring out of itself – an impossibility.
Many of the so called large events which shaped the world have no real effect on us today and only effected a past world, but an event which changed the world would have to have an eternal...
View Full Essay