Thomas Kuhn, 1962

• Idea that most science is about producing novelty that is not unexpected, to get the unexpected is to have failed
• Ephemerides are the tables with trajectories of celestial objects. Kuhn notes computing ephemerides as significant but spurned because of the tediousness and lack of novelty in the process
• He has some fixation/weirdness with ideas about what a scientist is? Specifically about concern with understanding the world, looking for disorder and applying a process to do empiricism
• Pre-paradigm period is about debate over what constitutes a legitimate method and what the rules to the puzzle are and figuring out what the problems are.
• Has this analogy of paradigm articulation being like a puzzle sometimes, in that it has a solution and has many parts
• Quantum mechanics (he also cites Newtonian dynamics or electromagnetic theory) is a paradigm used for multiple fields but is not the same paradigm for each.
• Distinction between discovery and invention, fact and theory are exceedingly artificial <3.
• There’s a psychological experiment where people are shown invalid cards (red spades) and with a short exposure, people don’t notice anything wrote and with longer exposures people not the “anomaly”. Kuhn claims that precision and good retrieval to identify the anomaly is an important skill.
• Introduces Copernican astronomy as a crisis, following the Ptolemaic system (which was things go around the Sun, actually) even though the Ptolemaic system mostly worked, but was never quite perfect
• There was crisis with phlogistons in chemistry, where by the time the Lavoisier work was done, people were kind of stuck with too many anomalies.
• Strong claim that to achieve a new paradigm, there has to be a crisis. Cites that people did have the ideas for oxygen and Copernican astronomy before the revolution but they did not take because they were insufficiently in crisis mode.
• Wolfgang Pauli had a personal crisis moment where he felt Physics was “confused” and wish he hadn’t done it but felt better after reading Heisenberg’s paper on matrix mechanics felt that it was “again possible to march forward” 🥺
• The transition of paradigms can look a lot like pre-paradigm science, and it’s also the case that a paradigm is not quite dropped until the new is discovered (scientists see anomalies but don’t throw away their theories just yet, maybe normal science can save them). Also the case that for some evidence, there are usually multiple viable theories so in the crises stage, paradigm candidates compete.
• Not all anomalies are studied, or equally pressing, or lead to crisis. How are they prioritised?
• “extraordinary science” is what Kuhn calls the science that seems to be of the next paradigm without the crisis? Seems like he’s claiming they eventually take off at a crisis point anyway.
• At the time, the idea that things were not continuous improvement (but that previous paradigms had to be torn down for new ones in the process of revolution) were really rare and he spends a lot of time talking about this
• Paradigm shifts as genuine worldview changes (ties in with idea that the shift has not completed until it’s fully internalized)
• Effluvium theory (Lucretius), there’d be an efflux of particles going out that attract things. Tried to explain magnetism. Kuhn is most outdated in that the sciences he studies were about more concrete incorrectnesses than we currently work with, and so his ideas about worldview changes and puzzle pieces don’t land super well.
• Describes psychology as so untheorizable and presupposing of paradigm (duck rabbit)