All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. .. Or finally, the case that will most concern us here, a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.
Interpretation
Crises in science arise when existing paradigms are questioned, leading to the potential for new ideas to emerge.
This quote by Thomas Kuhn explains the nature of scientific crises, highlighting that they often begin when established paradigms become blurred and traditional research rules are altered. Such crises can lead to significant shifts in understanding, culminating in the introduction of new paradigms that compete for acceptance within the scientific community.
In practice
In an academic paper discussing scientific progress, one might quote Kuhn to illustrate how paradigm shifts drive innovation.
To turn Karl [Popper]'s view on its head, it is precisely the abandonment of critical discourse that marks the transition of science. Once a field has made the transition, critical discourse recurs only at moments of crisis when the bases of the field are again in jeopardy. Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.
Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.
The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.
Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
All significant breakthroughs are break -βwithsβ old ways of thinking.
All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.
Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream.
Forty years as an astronomer have not quelled my enthusiasm for lying outside after dark, staring up at the stars. It isn't only the beauty of the night sky that thrills me. It's the sense I have that some of those points of light are the home stars of beings not so different from us, daily cares and all, who look across space with wonder, just as we do.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
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