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Early Life
Thomas was taught at Lincoln School, which was a private school, very progressive, and focused more on independent thinking than on rote learning and memorizing subjects -
High School Education
Thomas moved to a small town called Croton-on-Hudson, where he studied at another school, Hessian Hills, also a progressive school, where he found his love for mathematics. -
Higher Learning
He obtained a bachelors degree in physics from Harvard in 1943, he also obtained masters and PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949. -
Major Publication
At Berkeley in 1962 he wrote and published his greatest contribution to science: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn's work: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was an incredibly important book in science, it argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion, but rather goes through periods of revolution known as paradigm shifts. These paradigm shifts cause science to eventually stagnate, as in the famous words of Lord Kelvin: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” In Thomas Kuhn's book, he proved this incorrect. -
Effect On Society
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has exceeded all other works of social science as the most cited book in this field. The enormous impact of Kuhn's work can be measured in the changes it brought about in the vocabulary of the philosophy of science. The frequent use of the phrase "paradigm shift" has made scientists more aware of and in many cases more receptive to paradigm changes, so that Kuhn's analysis of the evolution of scientific views has by itself influenced that evolution. -
Cancer Diagnosis & Death
in 1994 Kuhn was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in 1996. -
Further Learning
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Citations
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.) "Thomas Kuhn - Biography, Facts and Pictures". Retrieved November 30, 2019. K. Brad Wray, Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology, Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bird, Alexander, "Thomas Kuhn", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/thomas-kuhn/.