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The birth of Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He was the oldest of 2, his younger brother Roger was born three years after.
Tom’s father, Samuel Louis Kuhn, was an engineer and investment consultant, who had also fought in World War 1. Tom’s mother, Minette Kuhn, came from a wealthy New York family.
When Tom was a few months old, the family packed up and decided to move to New York. -
early schooling
The family moved 40 miles north to a small town called Croton-on-Hudson where Tom attended a private school called Hessian Hills School. It was here that he learned to love mathematics. Influenced by his teachers, he also hoped to join the leftist American Student Union. Before joining it, members had to swear an oath never to fight for America. After talking to his father, he decided he could not sign. He left Hessian Hills in 1937. -
Harvard!
During Kuhn's sophomore year at Harvard, America entered World War 2. Kuhn decided to speed up his degree by going to summer school. He graduated with a "BS in Physics summa cum laude (with highest honor)" in 1943. not only did he study Physics, but he also spent his final year as head of the editorial board of the" Harvard Crimson", the college newspaper. -
war work
In the early summer of 1943, Kuhn joined the Radio Research Laboratory’s theoretical group. Based at Harvard, his group was in charge of "devising countermeasures against enemy radar." He was soon sent to work in a lab in the United Kingdom.
Later he traveled with a Royal Air Force officer to France for a few weeks to study recently captured German radar installations. -
back to Harvard!
Kuhn returned to Harvard after the war in Europe was over and graduated with a master’s degree in Physics in 1946 and even a doctorate in 1949. His PhD thesis was "The Cohesive Energy of Monovalent Metals as a Function of the Atomic Quantum Defects."
Before he returned to America,he started to slowly lose interest in physics but he continued studying it, because it was the most easy way for him to get a doctorates degree. -
paradigm shift
Kuhn first came up with the paradigm shift in his 1962 book called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The concept had started when he asked himself how such a smart man like Aristotle could have came up with such absurd ideas about motion. It then came to him that the "framework of science in which Aristotle interpreted facts was entirely different from the framework of science."
heres a video link more about it -
https://youtu.be/tasVTgZc9Gw -
Incommensurability
Kuhn used the word incommensurable to describe paradigms that represent different world views of the same subject. Perhaps for example, the ideas of Aristotle vs Newton, which are so different that there is very little common ground inbetween them. -
Princeton and MIT
In 1964, Kuhn moved to Princeton University as the "M. Taylor Pyne Professor" of Philosophy and History of Science. He later became "Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). -
personal life
In 1981, age 59, Kuhn married his second wife Jehane Barton Burns. -
retirement
He retired from MIT in 1991, at age 69. -
the passing of Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn died, age 73, of cancer on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was suffering severely from throat and lung cancer for almost two years.
here's a video link more about his life https://youtu.be/ZCQLVF_pEI0
