With the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, Thomas Samuel Kuhn inaugurated a new epoch in the understanding of science. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Kuhn studied physics at Harvard University. He went on to do graduate studies in theoretical physics, but decided to change to history of science just before finishing his dissertation. As he describes it in his preface to Structure :"A fortunate involvement with an experimental college course treating physical science for the non-scientist provided my first exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success. These conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to any discussion of science, and their failure of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift from physics to history of science, and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that initially led me to history."
During the period that Kuhn studied, thought and wrote Structure, Harvard was steeped in a particular ideology. Cambridge Massachusetts was the hub of the scientists who created Big Science and worked on the Manhattan project. And they were bringing both the ideology, as well as science on an industrial scale, back to the campuses. In particular, the President of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, had been instrumental in bringing the German large-scale 'industrial' model of scientific research to American academia after World War I. Conant was also the US atomic bomb administrator, mediating between the Congress and the Los Alamos team, and he was the person who convinced President Truman to argue that dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima was 'inevitable'. Conant became Kuhn's mentor and was responsible for persuading him to teach in the General Education in Science program, where he honed the theses of Structure, which is dedicated to Conant.
After completing his Ph.D., Kuhn remained at Harvard as a Junior Fellow, but he left when a job in the History of Science went, not to himself, but to the then more established historian, I. Bernard Cohen. (The committee that denied tenure to Kuhn at Harvard in 1956 regarded him as beholden to Conant - who had since left the Harvard presidency to become the first US ambassador to West Germany.) He went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did his most productive work. Then moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and finally returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His earlier research focussed on the history of thermodynamics, and his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), with a foreword by Canant, is a study of the development of heliocentrism during the Renaissance. But it was Structure, seen by many as one of the key books of the twentieth century, that established his reputation.
Kuhn looks at science from the particular perspective of a professional historian. He explores bigger themes, such as what is science really like in its actual practice, with concrete, empirical analysis. In Structure, he argues that scientists are not bold adventurers discovering new truths, rather they are puzzle-solvers working within an established worldview. Kuhn used the term 'paradigm' to describe the belief system that underpins puzzle solving in science. By using the term paradigm, he writes, 'I mean to suggest some accepted examples of actual scientific practice - examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together - provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research. These are traditions which history describes under such rubrics as "Ptolemaic Astronomy" (or "Copernican"), "Aristotelian dynamics" (or "Newtonian"), "corpuscular optics" (or "wave optics") and so on.' (10) The term paradigm is closely related to 'normal science': those who work within a dogmatic, shared paradigm use its resources to refine theories, explain puzzling data, establish increasingly precise measures of standards, and do other necessary work to expand the boundaries of normal science.
Thomas Kuhn died in 1994.