Thomas kuhn

Thomas Kuhn July 18th 1922 - June 17 1996

By Torch31

  • Birth

    Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18th, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Samuel Louis Kuhn, his father, was an industrial engineer who attended Harvard and MIT and served in World War I. Minette Kuhn, Thomas's mother, was a Vassar College graduate and heir to a rich New York family.

  • War

    Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory's theoretical group in the summer of 1943. His team was entrusted with designing countermeasures against hostile radar and was based at Harvard. He was quickly assigned to a laboratory in the United Kingdom.
    Later, he proceeded to France with a Royal Air Force officer for a few weeks to inspect newly captured German radar systems before continuing on to Germany.

  • Harvard

    Kuhn continued his study after finishing his master's degree in physics at Harvard in 1946, earning his doctorate in 1949. The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of Atomic Quantum Defects was his thesis title. As a result of this, Kuhn was elected to Harvard's Society of Fellows.

  • Becoming a professor

    Harvard had still not awarded Kuhn tenure in 1956. He accepted a position as an assistant professor inPhilosophy and History.
    He was promoted to associate professor and granted tenure in 1958. He began a one-year fellowship at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the fall of that year. He authored a large portion of his most influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, here.He was elevated to full professor of science history at Berkeley in 1961.

  • Scientific revolutions

    Kuhn discusses the history of science in this book. Kuhn then goes on to question what he refers to as "normal science." "He argued that scientific study and ideas are determined by "paradigms," or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted techniques," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQPsc55zsXA

  • Death

    Thomas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been suffering from throat and lung cancer for two years.