Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions 153
as he was concerned. His attitude is reflected in the following passage
from his presidential address to the American Physical Society in 1911:
The elements of which the model is constructed must be of
types, which are immediately perceived by everybody as the
ultimate data of consciousness. It is only out of such elements
that an explanation, in distinction from a mere barren set of
formulae, can be constructed. A description of phenomena, in
terms of four dimensions in space, would be unsatisfactory to
me as an explanation, because by no stretch of my imagination,
can I make myself believe in the reality of a fourth dimension.
The description of phenomena in terms of a time, which is a
function of the velocity of the body on which I reside, will be,
I fear, equally unsatisfactory to me, because, try I ever so hard,
I cannot make myself realize that such a time is conceivable.In contrast to the response of Magie, a supporter of the old Newtonian
paradigm, we have the euphoric response of Eddington. Eddington was a
member of the 1919 solar eclipse expedition to Africa, which detected
the bending of starlight by the sun. He finds Einstein’s new ideas
exhilarating and liberating as this excerpt from his early writings,
reveals:
To free our thought from the fetters of space and time is an
aspiration of the poet and the mystic, viewed somewhat coldly
by the scientist who has too good a reason to fear the confusion
of loose ideas likely to ensue. If others have had a suspicion of
the end to be desired, it has been left to Einstein to show the
way to rid ourselves of those ‘terrestrial adhesions to thought.’
And in removing our fetters he leaves us, not (as might have
been feared) vague generalities for the ecstatic contemplation
of the mystic, but a precise scheme of world-structure to
engage the mathematical physicist.Kuhn maintains that a scientific revolution occurs when the existing
forms can no longer accommodate new facts and offer no possibility of
resolution. The only recourse is to a new system with a different set of
values. It is obvious that Magie and Eddington have a different set of
values and hence, could never convince each other which framework is
the correct one. It can be argued that Newtonian physics is not really