The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

    This was a very challenging book that I did not fully understand, but the parts I did understand were pretty interesting. In brief, Kuhn argues that the history of science is not continuous and is not always the history of pure progress. Rather, it is a history of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Apparently this book popularized the word "paradigm." Science depends on paradigms to set out the goals of research, the questions worth asking, many of the rules of a field, and the general conception of what is true. With a paradigm in place, scientists can conduct normal research (synonymous, I think, with basic research), which is a type of science designed to confirm the paradigm, using experiments to confirm the theory. However, sometimes, in the course of normal research, scientists discover anomalies. Some anomalies, and more likely when many anomalies of the same type are found, it can trigger a crisis in the field--the paradigm ceases to adequately explain the world. Then, from that crisis, a revolution in science can occur, in which a new paradigm emerges to explain both the old paradigm and the anomalies as well. A paradigm doesn't need to completely explain all phenomena, it just needs to be better at doing so than its competitors.

    Paradigms are useful because, once they can be taken for granted, scientists don't need to publish long treatises, establishing very fact upon which they make assumptions for more detailed research. Rather, once a paradigm has crystallized out of experience and theory, scientists can publish shorter articles, acknowledging, sometimes implicitly, the paradigm under which they work, and continuing to develop more detailed knowledge within that paradigm. Then, information can be passed on more quickly through textbooks that compile the normal research that occurs within the paradigm. Given this, scientists need to be aware that the science they learn in textbooks is an incomplete history of science. The science of textbooks, by eliminating all the rejected paradigms and interpreting all research through the accepted paradigm, imply that the development of the field has been a linear process of construction one block onto another. A more accurate conception of scientific development would be something like a story of searching for a road through dark woods, with different paths representing different paradigms, and the normal research under the current paradigm being the best and longest path out that has been discovered so far. But other paths have been taken in the past which led to becoming lost, backtracking, and working down the current path/paradigm. This means that, when looking back, all scientific production would seem like progress, but it may in fact be leading to a crisis and revolution.