Remember the publication that Pluto is no longer considered a planet? I remember our physics teacher being very angry that the space agency was ignoring what was known and generally accepted by the general public. In my essay, I will discuss how “old” knowledge was affected when new aspects of particular knowledge were discovered. I will focus on two areas of knowledge: the natural sciences and the arts and ask: to what extent can new knowledge contribute to the abundance of old and generally accepted facts? Today's medicine perfectly understands how human blood circulation works. However, in ancient Greece, people believed that blood was linked to air, spring, and a cheerful personality. It was also believed that the liver produced all the blood. This belief was valid until William Harvey described blood circulation in much the same way as we know it today. He added the crucial experimental discovery that blood is “pumped” through the body by the heart. This foundation caused a chain reaction in medicine. New discoveries were discovered that led to our current understanding of medicine that we know today. If you ask a random person what the Greeks thought about blood circulation, only a few could answer this question correctly, because this "old" knowledge was abandoned as soon as a new discovery appeared. This discovery caused a paradigm shift in natural sciences. Not only in medicine, but also in biology, chemistry and physics, and that's basically what paradigm shifts are about. A paradigm is an overarching theory shared by the community of scientists, used to make sense of certain aspects of reality. A scientific revolution or paradigm shift occurs when scientists sit down in the middle of a paper...and critically examine their prior knowledge in order to decide if that knowledge is really worth plentiful on. Fortunately, some scientists later discover this discarded knowledge and take it as a basis for their further research (as in the Leibniz–Einstein case) which helps establish new aspects of knowledge. Works Cited • Wikipedia. "Blood." 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood#History (accessed February 2, 2014). • Planetseed.com. "Medicine and the Scientific Revolution | History of Medicine | PlanetSEED." 2014. http://www.planetseed.com/ratedarticle/rise-scientific-medicine-scientific-revolution (accessed February 2, 2014). • Lagemaat, Richard Van De. Theory of knowledge for the IB diploma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. • Wikipedia. “Movie room.” 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater#Spelling_and_alternative_terms (accessed February 2 2014).