Hugo O n June 17, Thomas Samuel Kuhn, professor of philosophy and history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died. Professor Kuhn is best known for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution published in 1962. The book's thesis is that knowledge and understanding are not incremental cumulative processes, but rather processes punctuated with radical shifts or changes in perspective.
People adhere to a world view or theory that is successful in explaining observations.
They continue to hold this view until evidence is so overwhelming that a new perspective must be adopted. Indeed, one must sometimes wait for a new generation for the intellectual revolution to complete. Physics, the most rigorous of the sciences, illustrates these shifts most clearly The end of the last century was a heady time for physicists. Newton's laws of motion had been successful in explaining mechanics. These laws made extremely precise predictions of celestial motion.