You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So, not satisfied to learn physics in four years, you want to learn it in four minutes?) We cannot do it i

It was not new experimental data that led to the great conceptual leap represented by special relativity, but rather Einstein’s faith in the conceptual appropriateness of theories that had shown themselves to be empirically adequate, their apparent contradictions notwithstanding. This reconstruction of the logic of a scientific revolution stands al

For Kuhn, a scientific theory is a conceptual framework, a “paradigm,” for describing a series of phenomena.