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Thomas "Tom" Kuhn (Birth-High School Years)
Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents sent him to a handful of private progressive schools from elementary to his high school years where he excelled exponentially in mathematics and science. -
College Education
America entered World War II during Tom's sophomore year in college. To speed up his curriculum, Tom took classes in the summer and earned his BA in physics with highest honors (summa cum laude) in 1943. After the war ended in Europe, he came back to Harvard and finished his Master's in Physics in 1946 and earned his PhD in 1949. -
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Military Career
Tom joined and worked with the Radio Research Laboratory's theoretical group, in England, where he examined radar installations on the continent. -
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Taught History and Philosophy at Harvard under General Education
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Assistant Professor of Philosophy and History at University of California-Berkeley
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The Copernican Revolution
Kuhn became an assistant professor in the philosophy and history department at Berkeley. He turned from studying the scientific work of Aristotle to concentrating on the history of science to focusing on the history of astronomy. This led him to publish his first book "The Copernican Revolution". The book explains the transformation from Aristotles geocentric model to Copernicus' heliocentric model of the universe and the effect on what we believe and value today. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn did his one-year fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Advance Study where he drafted his most influential book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolution." Published in 1962, Kuhn's central idea was the development of science which is driven, in the period of normal science, by adherence to a 'paradigm'.
For an introduction to the Kuhn Cycle click the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOGZEZ96ynI&list=RDLVL70T4pQv7P8&index=5 -
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Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton
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The Essential Tension Essays
A collection of essays titled "The Essential Tension" was published. The volume is separated into two section. Section I is labeled "Historiographic Studies" and section II is labeled "Metahistorical Studies". The essays major purpose is to explain, illuminate, modify, and defend the theses in the book and emphasize the importance of tradition in science. -
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity
Kuhn published his 2nd historical monograph "Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity". His book is based on the early history of quantum science and surveys the work of Max Planck at the end of the 19th century. -
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Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at MIT
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Death
Thomas Samuel Kuhn battled lung cancer and died at the age of 73 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.