Thomas Kuhn (July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. - June 17, 1996, Cambridge, Mass)
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The Copernican Revolution
Thomas Kuhn was first influenced by Aristotle's works, which got him into the history of science and astronomy. In his first book, "The Copernican Revolution", Kuhn studied the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance. The overthrow of Ptolemaic cosmology by Copernican heliocentrism is an example of major paradigm shifts.(Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Thomas S. Kuhn | American Philosopher and Historian.”) -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
In Kuhn's second book, he argued that scientific research and thought are defined by “paradigms,” that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. A crisis in science, called ‘anomalies’, arises. Then, scientific revolution occurs when one paradigm is accepted and replaces another paradigm.
Link to Khun's Structure of Scientific Revolutions -
The Essential Tension
After publishing his book, Thomas Kuhn released a collection of essays entitled "The Essential Tension", which is about the philosophy and history of science. He emphasized the importance of tradition in science. Its major purpose is to illuminate, explain, and modify his theses in the previous books he had written. (Williams, L. P, 1980) -
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity(1894-1912)
In this essay, Thomas Kuhn looked Max Planck's works about quantum mechanics. It demonstrated incommensurability between mature quantum theory and early quantum theory by Planck, which was based on classical statistical physics. According to Kuhn, Planck did not think about a genuine physical discontinuity of energies until 1908, which is after Albert Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest emphasized it in 1905–1906. (Burnell, Louis, 1980)
