- Lived:
- 1922–1996 · Cincinnati, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, MIT
- Tradition:
- American philosophy and history of science; the historicist turn
- The Big Idea:
- Science does not grow by smoothly stacking up truths; it alternates between long stretches of rule-governed puzzle-solving and rare revolutions that change the rules — and the frameworks on either side of a revolution do not fully translate into each other.
- In their words:
- "…the scientist afterward works in a different world."
- If you remember one thing:
- A physicist spent one afternoon in 1947 learning to read Aristotle on Aristotle's own terms — and out of that flip came the most argued-over book about science ever written.