The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Interpretation
Paradigm shifts in scientific understanding lead to profound changes in our perception of the world.
Thomas Kuhn's quote highlights the transformative power of changing paradigms in the field of science. When foundational theories, or paradigms, evolve, they not only alter scientific frameworks but also reshape our fundamental understanding of reality itself, impacting culture, society, and future discoveries.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the history of scientific revolutions.
To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.
Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.
Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
All significant breakthroughs are break -βwithsβ old ways of thinking.
If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.
The thing I'm most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?
Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.
But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
Scientists never stop asking. They're little kids who never grew up.
What we want is scientists who don't become part of the policy discussion: All they do is produce science. If someone becomes an advocate, then I won't pay as much attention to their science.
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