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Jun. 15th, 2015 05:19 pmThomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolution is most famous in the popular culture for coining the phrase 'paradigm shift', which the popular culture then proceeded to horribly misinterpret. It's most famous in the scientific community among people who like thinking about the bigger picture of scientific discovery as one of the most definitive accounts of how the scientific community moves from the orthodoxy of an old scientific theory to its replacement.
Kuhn separates scientific research into three categories- prescience, which is exploratory and unsystematic, normal science, which operates under the acceptance of the current scientific theory and develops the theory in detail, and revolutionary science, which rejects the current paradigm.
And what I recall finding striking about Structures of Scientific Revolution was Kuhn's notion that because revolutionary science is fundamentally opposed to normal science, people engaged in one can't really communicate their ideas to people engaged in the other, and people doing normal science are so reluctant to embrace revolutionary science that a political entanglement happens and revolutionary science tends to win out not when the rest of the scientific community is convinced of its value, but when the old generation gradually retires/dies and is replaced with a generation that grew up accepting the revolutionary science as its own normal science.
I found this analysis striking, satisfying, in alliance with a lot of the data, and in complete disagreement with everything I'd been taught about the scientific method in school. According to the idealized scientific method, when someone establishes a new scientific theory, everyone the scientific community looks at it, says "That seems right", and adopts it. But the reality is that science is not magic, and the personalities of the people driving science forward matter to its adoption.
Where I don't recall Kuhn being particularly specific, though, is about the process of political engagement between the old guard and the revolutionaries. And so I found myself looking at Kuhn with new eyes as I read Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen, a really well put together study of the personal and political dynamics of the German scientific community in the '20s, '30s, and early '40s and their interaction with the rise of Naziism. In particular, Beyerchen looks at Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, a pair of nationalistic German physicists who championed a Deutschephysik in opposition to Einstein's Judischephysik, i.e. relativistic physics. According to them, Deutschephysik was experimental and empirical where Judischephysik was theoretical. In reality, Deutschephysik was scientifically unproductive and eventually was abandoned, whereas relativity underpins much of modern science, including modern experimental physics.
This is interesting with respect to Kuhn because the adoption of relativity by the scientific community, which was a process that took decades, is one of the classic examples of a paradigm shift and how its adoption played out. But when you throw in the Deutschephysik aspect, Kuhn's notion of the push and pull that leads to paradigm shift starts to seem awfully reductionist. Opposition to relativity didn't only happen because older scientists were unwilling to embrace it, it also happened because of racism. It happened because it was politically convenient to oppose, because some (brilliant) physicists managed to construct an epistemology that was incredibly toxic and opposed to truth.
Or maybe I have it backwards. Maybe Deutschephysik was one of the normal science response to Einstein's revolution, maybe its racism was a consequence of the physicists struggling against their inability to make sense of the new theory within the paradigm they'd spent their life developing, maybe Kuhn's whole point is that revolution is never painless, that scientific revolutions should be studied with scrutiny because they are revolutions, traumatic overthrows of the values of a civilization. Relativity isn't important merely because it brings us closer to some magical truth of the universe, it's important because our struggle to accept it depends on who we are as a society and what our values are.
As I write this, I'm also thinking about Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem, which also depicts a society coming to terms with a paradigm shift of sorts, though the paradigm shift is "Humanity is not alone in this universe." And the meaning of the new paradigm is dependent on the politics of the people accepting it, because in Cixin Liu's China everything, even or especially science, is political. (The same is true in our America, and perhaps even in every civilization) The discovery of the Trisolarians doesn't create one new vision of the world, it creates a half dozen that then compete for primacy. The winner is not necessarily the 'truest', it's just the winner. That's something scientists should think about, when they talk about discovery in terms of 'elegance' or 'beauty' or 'truth'.
Kuhn separates scientific research into three categories- prescience, which is exploratory and unsystematic, normal science, which operates under the acceptance of the current scientific theory and develops the theory in detail, and revolutionary science, which rejects the current paradigm.
And what I recall finding striking about Structures of Scientific Revolution was Kuhn's notion that because revolutionary science is fundamentally opposed to normal science, people engaged in one can't really communicate their ideas to people engaged in the other, and people doing normal science are so reluctant to embrace revolutionary science that a political entanglement happens and revolutionary science tends to win out not when the rest of the scientific community is convinced of its value, but when the old generation gradually retires/dies and is replaced with a generation that grew up accepting the revolutionary science as its own normal science.
I found this analysis striking, satisfying, in alliance with a lot of the data, and in complete disagreement with everything I'd been taught about the scientific method in school. According to the idealized scientific method, when someone establishes a new scientific theory, everyone the scientific community looks at it, says "That seems right", and adopts it. But the reality is that science is not magic, and the personalities of the people driving science forward matter to its adoption.
Where I don't recall Kuhn being particularly specific, though, is about the process of political engagement between the old guard and the revolutionaries. And so I found myself looking at Kuhn with new eyes as I read Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen, a really well put together study of the personal and political dynamics of the German scientific community in the '20s, '30s, and early '40s and their interaction with the rise of Naziism. In particular, Beyerchen looks at Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, a pair of nationalistic German physicists who championed a Deutschephysik in opposition to Einstein's Judischephysik, i.e. relativistic physics. According to them, Deutschephysik was experimental and empirical where Judischephysik was theoretical. In reality, Deutschephysik was scientifically unproductive and eventually was abandoned, whereas relativity underpins much of modern science, including modern experimental physics.
This is interesting with respect to Kuhn because the adoption of relativity by the scientific community, which was a process that took decades, is one of the classic examples of a paradigm shift and how its adoption played out. But when you throw in the Deutschephysik aspect, Kuhn's notion of the push and pull that leads to paradigm shift starts to seem awfully reductionist. Opposition to relativity didn't only happen because older scientists were unwilling to embrace it, it also happened because of racism. It happened because it was politically convenient to oppose, because some (brilliant) physicists managed to construct an epistemology that was incredibly toxic and opposed to truth.
Or maybe I have it backwards. Maybe Deutschephysik was one of the normal science response to Einstein's revolution, maybe its racism was a consequence of the physicists struggling against their inability to make sense of the new theory within the paradigm they'd spent their life developing, maybe Kuhn's whole point is that revolution is never painless, that scientific revolutions should be studied with scrutiny because they are revolutions, traumatic overthrows of the values of a civilization. Relativity isn't important merely because it brings us closer to some magical truth of the universe, it's important because our struggle to accept it depends on who we are as a society and what our values are.
As I write this, I'm also thinking about Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem, which also depicts a society coming to terms with a paradigm shift of sorts, though the paradigm shift is "Humanity is not alone in this universe." And the meaning of the new paradigm is dependent on the politics of the people accepting it, because in Cixin Liu's China everything, even or especially science, is political. (The same is true in our America, and perhaps even in every civilization) The discovery of the Trisolarians doesn't create one new vision of the world, it creates a half dozen that then compete for primacy. The winner is not necessarily the 'truest', it's just the winner. That's something scientists should think about, when they talk about discovery in terms of 'elegance' or 'beauty' or 'truth'.