The Structure of Scientific Revolutions summary

We’ve just learned that when scientists conduct experiments, they typically know what results to expect. However, the outcome doesn’t always align with their expectations. But why do unexpected results occur?

Well, in order to address ambiguities in the paradigm, the methodology, instruments and experimental processes become far more sophisticated over time. That’s partly because scientists have specialties and devote huge amounts of their time to mopping up relatively small issues in an existent paradigm.

We’ve just seen how new discoveries and anomalies in scientific results can disrupt and alter a paradigm. Such disruptions shift the scientific landscape in a crucial way.

Before the anomaly occurs, scientists conduct normal science, which is about working toward closing gaps in an accepted paradigm. During this stage, researchers conduct experiments with specific expectations about the results. In a sense, they’re interested in definitively proving what they already know.

The amount of scientific progress that’s occurred over the course of human civilization is mind-boggling. And most of us believe that this is a cumulative process – meaning, each new discovery simply adds to everything that came before. We believe that, although old ideas are improved upon, they more or less stay the same.

This popular view, however, is actually wrong. Far from being a cumulative process, a paradigm shift is a revolutionary act.

After a scientific revolution occurs and a new paradigm emerges, scientists start seeing the world completely differently. Even though they’re using the same old instruments they’ve always worked with, they observe things they never would have noticed in the past.

How can that be possible? Well, paradigm shifts completely upend the scientific community’s perspective on reality by making possible new ways of looking at the world. Things that may have once been considered banal or even impossible suddenly become new areas of discovery and significance.