"I’m one of the few physicists I know who likes Thomas Kuhn. He was partly a historian of science, partly a sociologist. He got the basic idea right of what happens when the scientific paradigm shifts. A radical change of perspective suddenly occurs. Wholly new ideas, concepts, abstractions and pictures become relevant. Relativity was a big paradigm shift. Quantum mechanics was a big paradigm shift. So we keep on inventing new realisms. They never completely replace the old ideas, but they do largely replace them with concepts that work better, that describe nature better, that are often very unfamiliar, that make people question what is meant by “reality.” Then the next thing comes along and turns that on its head. And we are always surprised that the old ways of thinking, the wiring that we have or the mathematical wiring that we may have created, simply fail us."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPhysicists from the United StatesHistorians of science
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Leonard Susskind, in "Bad Boy of Physics", Interview by Peter Byrne, Scientific American (July 2011)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science and who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science.
74 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thomas Kuhn →
Related Quotes
"Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers."
"I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The book…"
"To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my …"
"Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fund…"
"History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in t…"
"Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes …"
"Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the as…"
""Normal science" means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some pa…"
"Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice…"
"If a demarcation criterion exists (we must not, I think, seek a sharp or decisive one), it may lie just in that part …"