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Arrival of Thomas Kuhn
Thomas (Tom) Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio into a scientific-oriented household. Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was a Cincinnati-born industrial engineer and investment consultant. Samuel graduated from Harvard and MIT and was also a WW1 Veteran. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn (née Strook), came from a wealthy New York family. A graduate of Vassar College, she dedicated her time to journalism and was a patron of the arts. -
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Inducted in Science
Admitted into Harvard to pursue a degree in physics, an 18-year-old Tom Kuhn may have initially chewed more than he could handle. He began to doubt his future in the scientific discipline after scoring mediocre scores in his exams. However, successful academic advising from his professors empowered him to work harder and raise his efforts. His efforts paid off and, after studying through the summers, Kuhn graduated with a BS in physics summa cum laude in 1943. -
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Experience During Wartime
After Kuhn earned his BS in Physics he joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group based at Harvard. Kuhn's team was responsible for developing countermeasures against enemy radar. He was subsequently reassigned to the United Kingdom to work in a laboratory. While in the UK, Kuhn traveled with the Royal Air Force to study captured Nazi radar equipment. -
Doctor in Physics
After his overseas assignment with the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group, Kuhn returned to Harvard and earned his master’s degree in Physics in 1946. His thesis 'The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects' earned him his PhD in 1949. His love for Physics dwindled after his master's degree. -
The Father of the Paradigm Shift
Kuhn's 1962 book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' described for the first time a philosophical concept that still reverberates in science to this day. The 'paradigm shift' concept arose from Kuhn's analysis of theories and ideas posed by ancient scientists. Kuhn criticized certain absurdities in ancient scientific work before identifying that they operated in a completely different scientific structure than modern scientists. Kuhn called the change of these structures paradigm shifts. -
Thomas Kuhn Speech
Thomas Kuhn speaking about his famous book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' in an excerpt from: "an intellectual autobiography in the form of an interview, conducted by Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, and Vassiliki Kindi in Athens in the fall of 1995" (Kuhn, The Road since Structure, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland, University of Chicago, 2000). https://youtu.be/UH_kXuhRIoQ -
Eternal Rest of an Icon
Thomas Kuhn's life work had an immense impact on contemporary scientific philosophy. He retired from MIT in 1991, age 69. After two years of battling cancer, Kuhn died June 17, 1996, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “…normal science is what produces the bricks that scientific research is forever adding to the growing stockpile of scientific knowledge.” -Thomas Kuhn -
REFERENCES
"Thomas Kuhn." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 12 Jun. 2017. www.famousscientists.org/thomas-kuhn. Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhn. Naughton, John. Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science. The Guardian. (18 Aug 2012). https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/19/thomas-kuhn-structure-scientific-revolutions
