"It is no accident that the emergence of Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century and of relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth should have been both preceded and accompanied by fundamental philosophical analyses of the research tradition. Nor is it an accident in both these periods that the so-called thought experiment should have played so critical a role in the progress of research... [T]he analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr, and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unattainable in a laboratory."
p.88, "The Response to Crisis," THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, by Thomas S. Kuhn (U. of Chicago: 1962, 2012)
Monday, May 26, 2014
THE VALUE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
THE VALUE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
"It is no accident that the emergence of Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century and of relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth should have been both preceded and accompanied by fundamental philosophical analyses of the research tradition. Nor is it an accident in both these periods that the so-called thought experiment should have played so critical a role in the progress of research... [T]he analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr, and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unattainable in a laboratory."
p.88, "The Response to Crisis," THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, by Thomas S. Kuhn (U. of Chicago: 1962, 2012)
"It is no accident that the emergence of Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century and of relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth should have been both preceded and accompanied by fundamental philosophical analyses of the research tradition. Nor is it an accident in both these periods that the so-called thought experiment should have played so critical a role in the progress of research... [T]he analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr, and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unattainable in a laboratory."
p.88, "The Response to Crisis," THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, by Thomas S. Kuhn (U. of Chicago: 1962, 2012)