Personal Revolutions

Thomas Khun was a famous philosopher of science primarily known for his work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. In this book he argues that science does not progress in a linear fashion, it is not just a accumulation of new knowledge. Instead he distinguishes two phases:

• Normal science;
• Revolutions, or “paradigm shift”.

The normal science phases, the most intuitive, are those in which knowledge accumulates and where we are able to explains new phenomena. But Khun says that at one point new events are observed and these events are in conflict with the vision of the world that science has at that precise moment. In these times scientific revolutions happen and our view of the world changes allowing us to understand new events.

I believe that the also life develops in this way. We accumulate new experiences and knowledge, new feelings. We can enjoy or not the new input but sometimes something changes. We discover a new hobby, meet a particular person, we lose a job or find a new one, we get an injury playing our favorite sport or maybe we lose someone important. These are the paradigm shifts.

Often we do not realize it because the triggering events are common events, which do not depend on us, that happen to many people or perhaps the change is not that important. But sometimes we feel foreign to our own life, the things that we do not seem right anymore. We begin to question everything. Yet we resist because it is not easy to admit we were wrong, that we had thrown years into something that now not only does not make us happier but it makes us suffer.

At this time we are changing paradigm, we are changing vision of the world and for a period we live a dichotomy, we are divided between the old and the new paradigm. It is easy to believe that we had lost time or to have it all wrong but the truth is that what we did was perfectly correct in our old view of the world. Now we have a new one.

Understand this and accept it may allow us to meet the challenges ahead, the paradigm shifts, with more energy and confidence. For the first time in my life I am aware of a paradigm shift because I am facing two major changes: I left my academic career as a mathematician to become a developer and I just came out of a long and important relationship. It took months to accept the change, but now that I’m accumulating new experiences in the light of my new view of the world, I’m excited because I feel I have made a big step forward and I’m curious to find out where I will go after my next revolution.