Name: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Rating: 4.3 (82 reviews)
Author: Thomas S. Kuhn

What’s in it for me? Discover how scientific progress happens through revolutions.

How does science progress? Through small incremental changes? That’s the common view. We think that every scientist – from the philosophers in the ancient world to the hobbyists and tinkerers of the enlightenment, right on up to modern scientists with their computerized models – builds upon, and adds to, the work of those before.

Though this might seem like a nice model of constant, uninterrupted progress, the truth is slightly different. Rather than advancing gradually, science moves forward in revolutions. Each major new idea doesn't build upon previous ones; instead, it supplants them completely. These blinks show you exactly how this happens.

In these blinks you’ll discover

why two views of science can’t share the same world; and
why scientists spend a lot of their time mopping up.

Scientific progress relies on paradigms, the shared frameworks of accepted theories and knowledge.

Imagine a scientific laboratory. Do you see a frazzled man in a white lab coat, mixing strange chemicals in smoking test tubes, unsure as to how his experiments will turn out?

Well, that’s not exactly how the scientific method works. Truth is, experiments are never done randomly; scientists know precisely what they want to test. And often, they can even predict the outcome before they start.

They can make these predictions because of paradigms, frameworks of accepted theories and shared knowledge that govern scientific work. For example, Newtonian physics is a paradigm that relies on Newton’s laws of motion.

This kind of shared knowledge is crucial, because it gives scientists a foundation to build upon. By accepting some fundamental principles developed by previous research, scientists can concentrate on supplementing established ideas, rather than constantly reestablishing an initial framework.

Because, ultimately, a paradigm is just that – a framework. It can’t explain everything, since there are always going to be gaps in our knowledge and disjunctions between scientific theory and hard reality.

That’s why most scientists spend their time mopping up, that is, trying to plug the knowledge gaps and align theory with reality. For instance, Newton’s ideas were brilliant, but the equipment he used to conduct his research was rudimentary. And that produced certain ambiguities. In the following centuries, scientists developed equipment and devised experiments to address those knowledge gaps. This rigorous research led to our deeper understanding of Newtonian laws.

And, as mentioned earlier, when they’re mopping up, scientists pretty much know what kind of results they can expect. Because the paradigm governs their thinking, they don’t really expect to produce a novel outcome that falls outside the theoretical framework.

As we’ll discover in the next blink, however, scientists who aren’t looking for novelty often stumble upon it anyway.

Encountering anomalies in their research forces scientists to reconsider existing paradigms.

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.

Scientific crisis occurs when anomalies break down the accepted 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.

Scientific change is a revolutionary process: When a new paradigm emerges, the old one must be discarded.

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.

A scientific revolution radically shifts perspectives, leading to new discoveries.

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.

Key ideas in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions