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Early Life, and An Inspiration to Pursue Philosophy
Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, OH in 1922 to his father, Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and his mother, Minette Stroock Kuhn. As a young man preparing to enter Harvard in 1940, he knew that he would pursue the fields of physics and mathematics. After finishing his undergraduate degree, Kuhn served in the Army for two years working with radar technology. His inspiration for studying the philosophy of science was shaped greatly by America's deployment of nuclear bombs in WWII. -
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Mentorship, and Professional Development
After his service, Kuhn returned to Harvard to complete his doctoral studies in 1949. James Conant, Harvard's President and Kuhn's mentor, was a key player in the program known as the Manhattan Project. Conant returned to Harvard at the end of the war and enlisted Kuhn into a project that would expand science to both students and the public. Kuhn continued to teach and in 1961 became a professor at the University of California where he would write "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". -
The Copernican Revolution
Published in 1957, Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution" calls into question if this was a scientific revolution, or a precursor to a scientific revolution. The Copernican Model of 1543 was the first to depict a heliocentric system in which the Sun sat at the center of our solar system. Kuhn's issue with the Copernican system and the rule created by Copernicus is that Copernicus produced no decisive evidence. This is evidence of his own growth as his views on shifts in paradigm continue to develop. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Originally published in 1962, Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was a revolution in the literature of scientific philosophy. His argument was that science advanced, plateaued, and experienced revolution in a "cyclic" pattern. He described these revolutions as "paradigm shifts" in which the way of thinking and the scale of understanding are changed in a collective manner. One key example used by Kuhn is the shift away from Newtonian Physics during the Einsteinian Revolution. -
Kuhn Speaks About "The Structures of Scientific Revolutions"
Here is a link to an interesting 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" just a year before his death. He discusses the different perspectives and responses that his book was greeted with.
Click here.