"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 contemporary research tradition. Nor is it an accident that in both of these periods the so-called thought experiment should have played so critical a role in the progress of research. As I have shown elsewhere, the analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, and 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 the laboratory...
"The preceding remarks should suffice to show how crisis simultaneously loosens the stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift. Sometimes the shape of the new paradigm is foreshadowed in the structure that extraordinary research has given to the anomaly... More often no such structure is consciously seen in advance. Instead, the new paradigm, or a sufficient hint to permit later articulation, emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis. What the nature of the final stage is--how an individual invents (or finds he has invented) a new way of giving order to data now all assembled--must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so."
P.88-90, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, by Thomas S. Kuhn (U. of Chicago: 1962, 2012)
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
THOUGHT-EXPERIMENTS' POWER
"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 contemporary research tradition. Nor is it an accident that in both of these periods the so-called thought experiment should have played so critical a role in the progress of research. As I have shown elsewhere, the analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, and 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 the laboratory...
"The preceding remarks should suffice to show how crisis simultaneously loosens the stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift. Sometimes the shape of the new paradigm is foreshadowed in the structure that extraordinary research has given to the anomaly... More often no such structure is consciously seen in advance. Instead, the new paradigm, or a sufficient hint to permit later articulation, emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis. What the nature of the final stage is--how an individual invents (or finds he has invented) a new way of giving order to data now all assembled--must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so."
P.88-90, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, by Thomas S. Kuhn (U. of Chicago: 1962, 2012)