Thomas Kuhn and Scientific Revolutions: The Man Who Changed The Landscape of Science Forever
From Copernicus, to Darwin, to Einstein — Is Science as Critical as We Think?
An Everlasting Impact
Ideas in science change fast. Take your pick of virtually any scientific field and you will notice that the most prevailing ideas of today are incredibly different from those that came 50 years ago.
Such huge changes are not as prevalent in other fields such as the humanities and this propensity for rapid change led to a number of fascinating questions being asked in the philosophy of science.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American physicist and philosopher of science. In 1962, he published his seminal book, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, which would go on to become one of the most cited academic books of all time and change the landscape of scientific philosophy forever. If ever a big idea found itself in all corners of scientific academia, this is it.
A Revised Narrative
Before Kuhn, much emphasis was placed on the apparent objectivity of science. Unlike other disciplines which were predicated on precarious subjectivity, scientific disagreements could be settled in a fully…