Anthony's+Week+Nov+30-Dec4

“Guide to Thomas Kuhn’s //The Structure of Scientific Revolutions//” by Malcolm Forster is exactly what the name described. It is a lengthy summary of Kuhn’s work. The central theme of Kuhn’s work is the “paradigm.” This is an idea in science that is “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity,” as well as “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve." In effect a scientific paradigm can be summed up using a cliché movie line: “That idea is just crazy enough to work.” The paradigm replaces the old way of thinking, but in doing so creates a whole new set of problems that need to be solved, ultimately leading to the next one. What causes a paradigm? That question leads to the most interesting part (to me) entitled “No Paradigm Change without Crisis.” It states that despite flaws in scientific theory, we work around them until they reach a critical point, and that is when we come up with something completely new. This is such a simple statement, yet such an over looked one. Take for example, the introduction of the quantum. Planck came up with this radical idea, only because no other idea that already existed fit what the data was giving him. Only when we reach a point where we get so fed up with errors do we go out on a limb one might say, and come up with this crazy idea that all our peers instantly dismiss. We take this risk because we see no other option to fit the data. However, in the end this crazy leaps of scientific faith usually become the mythical “revolutions” we write texts books about. Forster, using the words and ideas of Kuhn, shows that major scientific advancement comes only when there is a crisis.