Scientific Paradigm Quotes & Sayings

For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of early ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. — Thomas S. Kuhn

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.
— Reba McEntire

New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and understanding. Big ones. Paradigm shifts. — Howard Bloom

The battle over the validity of evolution has been publicly posed as a scientific one. However, you will find little sign of it in scientific journals, where such quarrels as exist are over details, not the basic concept ... Evolution has proved so useful as a paradigm for the origin and structure of life that it constitutes the foundation of the sciences of biology and medicine. — Victor J. Stenger

Looking at scientific inquiry, next paradigm will be based on very large datasets. Scientists are in the lead in handling very large datasets - Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider are massive datasets. — David Willetts

Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both?

One aspect of the parallelism must already be apparent. Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way. In both political and scientific development the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution. — Thomas S. Kuhn

In these and other respects a discussion of puzzles and rules illuminates the nature of normal scientific practice. Yet, in another way, that illumination may be significantly misleading. Though there obviously are rules to which all the practitioners of a scientific specialty adhere at a given time, those rules may not by themselves specify all that the practice of those specialists has in common. — Thomas S. Kuhn

The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists. — Michael Denton

C'mon. We can turn it into a fun game - What's Scarier, The Basement Or The Attic? — Darcy Coates

Western Civilization was responsible for a paradigm shift in history. It created the industrial and scientific revolutions that enabled the birth of a transportation, communications and knowledge revolution unprecedented in the 5 billion year history of this planet. Unfortunately this revolution took place amidst a moral vacuum at the very top of the power structure. It is as if a three year old child had been given control over both a candy story and a shotgun. He was able to use the shotgun to get all the candy he wanted but he had no idea what to do next. Whenever somebody tried to tell him too much candy was bad for him, he shot the person who said that. — Benjamin Fulford

The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. — Stephen R. Covey

In Return to Life, Jim Tucker painstakingly and meticulously documents the recycling of memories from beyond the barrier of physical death. He then rigorously offers a scientific theory to explain how our consciousness transcends space/time and is, hence, eternal. This book is an important milestone of an emerging scientific paradigm that suggests that consciousness conceives governs constructs and becomes the universe or perhaps multiple universes. — Deepak Chopra

Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead. — Neil Gaiman

Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read - and more widely misinterpreted - than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn's position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn's analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists' claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded. — Philip Kitcher

Here is Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, describing the way scientists react when their pet theories are unraveling: "What scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies," Kuhn wrote, " ... . [is] renounce the paradigm that led them into crisis." Instead, he concluded, "A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place." That is, scientific theories very seldom collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. They topple only when a new and seemingly better belief turns up to replace it. — Kathryn Schulz

A lot of times in Hollywood you're as good as your last job. — Liev Schreiber

Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world ... I am convinced that we must learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these. What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a re-interpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not unequivocally stable. — Thomas Kuhn

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. — Max Planck

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation. — Rudy Rucker

[The theory of universal gravitation] is not cast-iron. No theory is, and there is always room for improvement. Isn't that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth ... Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn't it? And if it eventually turns out that they're not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that's closer. Right? — Isaac Asimov

They [progressives] are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm. — William F. Buckley Jr.

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field. — Thomas S. Kuhn

I really like sometimes to do action pictures; I get a really big kick out of doing those. — Stanley Clarke