Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry

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Chapter 16

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and

the Impact of the Theory of Relativity

Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity caused a revolution
in scientific thought, which affected a number of other fields as well. We
will study the nature of these two revolutions and their influence on the
various aspects of human thought. Thomas Kuhn (1972), in his book,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, proposes a model to explain the
nature of how a scientific revolution takes place. We shall review Kuhn’s
theory and examine the Einsteinian revolutions in terms of it.
Kuhn does not regard the history of science as the accumulation of
“the facts, theories and methods collected in current texts”. He believes
this view of history arises from the tradition of teaching physics from
textbooks in which the true historical processes are suppressed and
science is presented as an accumulation of knowledge. Kuhn sees the
history of science as a competition between different worldviews in
which revolutions periodically occur whenever a worldview fails to
accommodate new observations or new ways of looking at older
observations. He claims that:

The early developmental stages of most sciences have been

characterized by continual competition between a number of

distinct views of nature, each partially derived from, and all

roughly compatible with, the dictates of scientific observation

and method.

One body of beliefs wins out over the others because it provides a
more satisfying description of nature. This usually occurs as a result of
some success that the new theory achieves. This success becomes the
model or paradigm for future scientific work, which Kuhn labels as
normal science. The paradigm becomes a conceptual framework into