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Thomas Kuhn Birth
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA -
Undergraduate at Harvard
Started is degree in physics, at first it didn't go well. In his sophomore year, America entered World War 2. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by attending classes in summer. He graduated with a BS in Physics summa cum laude (with highest honor) in 1943. -
War Work
In the summer of 1943, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was tasked with devising countermeasures against enemy radar. He was soon sent to work in a laboratory in the United Kingdom -
Back to Harvard
Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe ended and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and doctorate in 1949. His PhD thesis was The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects. -
Berkeley & the Center for Advanced Study
In 1956, Harvard had still not offered Kuhn tenure. He accepted an offer from the University of California at Berkeley, where he became an assistant professor in both the Philosophy and History Departments. In 1961, he was promoted to full professor of the History of Science at Berkeley. He agreed to accept the position in History. -
The Copernican Revolution
While teaching at Harvard Kuhn taught undergraduate courses that delved into Aristotle's work. He quickly became perplexed from Aristotle's work. This led up to his first book being published, The Copernican Revolution. -
The Paradigm Shift
Kuhn first described the paradigm shift in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept had been in his mind for many years, starting when he asked himself how an intelligent man like Aristotle could have harbored absurd ideas about motion. -
Princeton
In 1964, Kuhn moved to Princeton University as the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science. -
Kohns Eassy's
Kuhn’s later works were a collection of essays, The Essential Tension (1977), and the technical study Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978)." -
MIT
In 1979, he became Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). -
Death of Thomas Kuhn
homas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years
