A wonderful web page dedicated solely to the amazing book by T.S. Kuhn...

"It is often said that if Greek science had been less deductive and less ridden by dogma, heliocentric astronomy might have begun its development EIGHTEEN CENTURIES (not original emphasis) earlier than it did."

- T.S. Kuhn, Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories

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If that quote, and the idea that what you believe to be definite and irrefutable "laws" of science (because they were taught to you by your textbooks and intelligent professors) may not be so infallible...read on!

Links to other pages about (or at least that mention) Kuhn

  • Another page with a brief summary of each chapter of this book
    (Do a "find" on "kuhn" when you get there...it is rather lengthy)
  • A page about planning the software revolution
    (Kuhn is mentioned merely as a reference, but an inte resting page nonetheless.)
  • About another book of Kuhn's called World Changes
    (actually, the page mainly mentions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but check it out anyway.)
  • An outline of some sort which mentions Kuhn
    (appears to be lecture notes of some type...hunt around if you are interested.)
  • One man's view of Kuhn's "self-refuting epistemological relativism"
    (McGrew's words...not ours)
  • For those of you who speak some other langua ge with a lot of symbols, here is a page about Kuhn in that language...
    (maybe)

    An anomaly...

    What card to you see below? If you are like most people, at first glance you will see either a six of hearts or a six of spades...no problem, right? Well, upon closer inspection you will find that there is a problem -

    WHO EVER HEARD OF A RED SPADE?

    In the chapter An omaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, Kuhn discusses the experiment conducted by Bruner and Postman concerning anomalous playing cards, and how people do not like things which do not fit into the paradigms they know, and therefore they of ten disregard them and make them into something which is not anomalous. This is why anomalies in science are often overlooked, and it is not until a crisis becomes apparent that paradigms begin to shift to new (not to say "correct") paradigms and scienti fic theories.

    This is really the crux of Kuhn's theses - at least for the first half of the book. (We are reminded of James Burke and his discussion of why we see the dalmation in the picture, and why it seems wrong now to burn witches when it seemed so right to the people centuries ago - people accept what fits into the paragidms they know and believe.)

    Now that you are entirely intrigued...

    Check out our fascinating, yet not too revealing, overview of < em>The Structures of Scientific Revolutions

    Here are some other interesting items...links, pictures, quotes, etc. that will delight the scientific mind to no end.

  • "Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hope s and desires, where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to comtemplate, there we enter the realm of art and of science. If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science; if we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intutitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art. Common to both is the devotion to something beyond the personal, remove d from the arbitrary." A. Einstein

  • Another cool picture of Einstein (with a quote!)

  • Tracy Q. Gardner's Homepage (Okay, so I have no shame...)

  • "My original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery which has never ceased to fill me with enthusiasm since my early youth - the comprehension of the far from obvious fact that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we r eceive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the later. In this connection, it is of paramount importance that the outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life". Max Planck in Scientific Autobiography.
  • "The most striking - and a unique - feature of the mind is the acceptance and use of things as symbols standing for other things. Symbols may stand for, refer to, or mean other things which may or may not lie within the world of physics.....In this sense we find the mind in computing machines".R ichard L. Gregory in Mind of Science

    The End

    ...or is it?