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Birth
Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in the summer of 1922 to his father Samuel Kuhn, an industrial engineer and investment consultant, and his mother Minette Kuhn, a free lance editor. His family moved to New York a few months after his birth. -
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Studies at Harvard
Kuhn earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in physics in 1943 and 1946 respectively. He would go on to earn his PhD in the history of science later in 1949. -
Drive Toward Philosophy
In the summer of 1947 Kuhn attempted to read Aristotle's "Physics" and found himself unable to understand the Greek's ideas of motion. Thinking on this, Kuhn realized he was trying to understand Aristotle's work using his knowledge of the modern Newtonian physics, which Aristotle would be working without. When he realized he had to abandon his modern Newtonian assumptions and use assumptions that would've been privy to the ancient Greeks. This drove Kuhn to study the philosophy behind science. -
Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn published his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in 1962. In the book Kuhn describes the process in which scientific paradigms shift in the stages Normal Science, Model Crisis, Model Revolution, and Paradigm Change. With these four stages research goes from routine "puzzle solving" to tackling inconsistencies that accumulate during the Normal Science phase, eventually to a revision of the scientific model. (https://youtu.be/Yn8cCDtVd5w) -
Death
Kuhn died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1996. He is renowned as one of the most influential minds on scientific history and philosophy.
