Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science. He found that basic ideas about how nature should be studied were dogmatically accepted in normal science, then increasingly questioned, and overthrown during scientific revolutions. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Thomas Kuhn was trained as a physicist but became an educator after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1949. He taught the history of science at Harvard, University of California/Berkeley, Princeton, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a member or director of many professional organizations and received many awards.

Kuhn was best known for debunking the common belief that science develops by the accumulation of individual discoveries. In the summer of 1947 something happened that shattered the image of science he had received as a physicist. He was asked to interrupt his doctorate physics project to lecture on the origins of Newton's physics...