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Birth
Thomas S. Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati Ohio. He was the first of two children, his father, a Cincinnati native was hydraulic engineer trained at Harvard University and MIT. -
Kuhn's Education
Kuhn attended the progressive Lincoln School in Manhattan in 1927 cultivating his independent thinking. During adolescent years his family moved fifty miles from Manhattan to Hessian Hills School. Kuhn spent his last two years of high school at the Yale-preparatory Taft School in Connecticut. Kuhn earned his Bachelors in 1943 and Master's in 1946 in physics at Harvard and obtained his Ph.D. in 1949 in the history of science. -
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Teaching Career
After graduating Harvard Kuhn went on to teach the history of the philosophy of science. Kuhn taught at Harvard from 1951-1956, the University of California at Berkeley 1956-1964, Princeton University 1964-1979, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1979-1991. Thomas S. Kuhn. (n.d.). Retrieved March 07, 2021, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-S-Kuhn -
The Copernican Revolution
Kuhn studied the heliocentric theory of the solar system in his book The Copernican Revolution. The heliocentric theory or the solar system states that the sun is the center of the system with all other planets revolving around it. Bird, A. (2018, October 31). Thomas Kuhn. Retrieved March 07, 2021, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#DeveScie -
Structure of Scientific Revolution
https://youtu.be/tasVTgZc9Gw Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. (n.d.). Retrieved March 07, 2021, from https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/#H1 -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Successive periods of normal and extraordinary science. Science is always changing, along with theories. Kuhn believed there were paradigm shifts, where current theories were disproven by scientific experiments. An example would be the Ptolemaic where the Earth is the center of the universe, to the Copernican theory where the sun is the center of the universe. The shift creates new specialities in research and understanding of new theories. -
Death
Kuhn passed in 1996 and left the scientific community with a different perspective than previous year before him. He saw gaps – a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are rushed into periods of chaos, uncertainty and torment. For example a move from Newtonian physics to quantum physics. He changed how science "works" and challenged many with is revolutionary results.
