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152 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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FabHK ◴[] No.42472523[source]
Do we have anomalies accumulating here that indicate the early phase of a scientific revolution in Thomas Kuhn's terminology, that is, a replacement of the standard model/QCD? Or is it still "so far, so good"?
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drpossum ◴[] No.42472672[source]
Do you feel like those two options would cover all possible scenarios for "the state of the field"?
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anyfoo ◴[] No.42473208[source]
Well, either the standard model is right, or it isn't, isn't it? They asked for indication of an "early phase", not that we're ready to throw the standard model out (which, boringly, held up extremely well so far).
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whatshisface ◴[] No.42473343[source]
The standard model Lagrangian is a sum of many terms, and changing one of them, adding a new one or even a radical revolution in our understanding of the results of integrals taken over it would not count as a Kuhnian revolution. Physics has not had one of those since Newton.
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Keysh ◴[] No.42474043{3}[source]
Physics has obviously had Kuhnian revolutions since Newton, the emergence of relativity and quantum mechanics being two obvious examples.
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whatshisface ◴[] No.42474705{4}[source]
Physics advances like geography: there's a New World in the Americas, but Libson is still there. Newtonian mechanics remains as the consequence of relativity and quantum mechanics where we "live," and the existence of other things under different conditions doesn't change that. Kuhnian revolutions involve the old models being discarded.
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1. Keysh ◴[] No.42476398{5}[source]
From Chapter VII of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd...):

"If awareness of anomaly plays a role in the emergence of new sorts of phenomena, it should surprise no one that a similar but more profound awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory. On this point historical evidence is, I think, entirely unequivocal. The state of Ptolemaic astronomy was a scandal before Copernicus’ announcement. Galileo’s contributions to the study of motion depended closely upon difficulties discovered in Aristotle’s theory by scholastic critics. Newton’s new theory of light and color originated in the discovery that none of the existing pre-paradigm theories would account for the length of the spectrum, and the wave theory that replaced Newton’s was announced in the midst of growing concern about anomalies in the relation of diffraction and polarization effects to Newton’s theory. Thermodynamics was born from the collision of two existing nineteenth-century physical theories, and quantum mechanics from a variety of difficulties surrounding black-body radiation, specific heats, and the photoelectric effect.4 Furthermore, in all these cases except that of Newton the awareness of anomaly had lasted so long and penetrated so deep that one can appropriately describe the fields affected by it as in a state of growing crisis."

Later in the same chapter, he gives three examples of crises that led to paradigmatic revolutions: "a particularly famous case of paradigm change, the emergence of Copernican astronomy."; "the crisis that preceded the emergence of Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion"; and "the late nineteenth century crisis in physics that prepared the way for the emergence of relativity theory."

Kuhn absolutely considered relativity and quantum mechanics to be examples of paradigmatic revolutions, just like Newtonian mechanics in the 17th Century and the earlier Copernican revolution.

If you want to argue that Kuhn was wrong about history, then you can do that (and I would at least partly agree); but if you want to claim Kuhn didn't say what he actually said, that's a different matter.