This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, the Copernican Revolution. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by Thomas Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the sociology of scientific knowledge, and popularized the terms paradigm and paradigm shift. The work was first published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, then as a book by University of Chicago Press in 1962. (All page numbers below refer to the third edition of the text, published in 1996). In 1969, Kuhn added a postscript to the book in which he replied to critical responses to the first edition of the book. Kuhn dated the genesis of his book to 1947, when he was a graduate student at Harvard University and had been asked to teach a science class for humanities undergraduates with a focus on historical case studies. Kuhn later commented that until then, "I'd never read an old document in science." Aristotle's Physics was astonishingly unlike Isaac Newton's work in its concepts of matter and motion. Kuhn concluded that Aristotle's concepts were not "bad Newton," just different. Kuhn's approach to the history and philosophy of science has been described as focusing on conceptual issues: what sorts of ideas were thinkable at a particular time? What sorts of intellectual options and strategies were available to people during a given period? What types of lexicons and terminology were known and employed during certain epochs? Stressing the importance of not attributing modern modes of thought to historical actors, Kuhn's book argues that the evolution of scientific theory does not emerge from...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=31500