Why am I passionate about this?
My father was a NASA scientist during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, so while most people knew the Space Race as a spectacle of thundering rockets and grainy lunar footage, I remember the very human costs and excitement of scientific progress. My space-cadet years come in snippetsâthe emotional break in my dadâs voice when Neil Armstrong hopped around the Moon; the strange peace I felt as I bobbed on a surfboard and watched another Saturn 1b flame into the sky. Later, as a journalist and author, I would see that such moments are couched in societal waves as profound and mysterious as the wheeling of hundreds of starlings overhead.
Joe's book list on mystery and chaos of scientific inquiry
Why did Joe love this book?
On the surface, this seems a dry treatise on the process of scientific change, but as you get into it, you encounter again and again the stories of hardheaded researchers convinced that the world explained by current theory just doesnât make sense and shows how they were driven, often reluctantly, to make sense of things. Priestleyâs and Lavoisierâs experiments are included with many others but always set within the framework of a discipline in a âcrisisâ that needs to be resolved.
The personal costs are not neglectedâridicule, isolation from the accepted âestablishment,â sometimes far worse. Scientific progress is often portrayed as a triumph of individual imagination confirmed by wider testing and collaboration. Kuhnâs work took that self-serving myth and tossed it out the window.
16 authors picked The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn challenged long-standingâŚ