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Thomas obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Harvard College. Shortly following he spent the remainder of the war years in research related to radar at Harvard and then in Europe. He studied remaining passionate about subject of quantum mechanics to solid state physics and Kuhn later was elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard -
Thomas earned his PhD degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949 under the observation of John Van Vleck. His findings of The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects led Kuhn to being elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. -
From 1948-1956 Thomas taught the history of science at Harvard university where he also taught a class in science for undergraduates in the humanities. This course was centered around historical case studies, and this was Kuhn’s first opportunity to study historical scientific texts in detail. Reading the scientific work of Aristotle was a formative experience, followed as it was by a more or less sudden ability to understand Aristotle properly, undistorted by knowledge of subsequent science. -
With a continuous recognition of the mixture of its technical, philosophical, and humanistic elements, Thomas displays the full scope of the Copernican Revolution and explains the internal development of astronomy, a critical turning point in the evolution of scientific notion, and a crisis in Western man’s concept of his relation to the universe and to God. -
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the term "paradigm shift". Paradigm shifts become apparent when the presiding paradigm under which normal science operates is rendered incompatible with new phenomena, enable the introduction of a new theory or paradigm. This became a noteworthy term towards science experiments regarding a transfer of when the original experiment begins to shift towards a new revelation.
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The Essential Tension taken from one of Kuhn’s earliest essays in which he emphasizes the importance of tradition in science. The following year saw the publication of his second historical monograph Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, concerning the early history of quantum mechanics.