Thomas Kuhn

5 results

We can build better, safer and more just societies based on our understanding that human nature defaults to good rather than evil. If we do that we’ll be able to replicate and grow the good we’ve seen all around us long after the novel coronavirus has been defeated. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
We’ve now seen that selfless, courageous action is not the preserve of saints or superheroes

It’s already July 2020 and we’re still in the throes of the Covid-19 global pandemic. We’re tired of restrictions and illness and fear and uncertainty(...)

Who was Robert Boyle and why were his experiments so important in the development of the modern scientific method?
Science history matters too much for us to carry on neglecting it

The importance of history as a core subject in school was recently articulated by Prof Diarmaid Ferriter in The Irish Times. Similar sentiments have b(...)

Cause for big debate: astronomers based in Western Australia detected a signal thought to represent the absorption of radiation by the very first stars when they formed many billions of years ago.
A science lesson from the dawn of the universe

While many academics in Ireland and the UK were snowbound at home earlier this month, an intriguing controversy was breaking in the world of physics. (...)

Last week’s solar eclipse brought to mind once again the formidable predictive power of science. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
A question of trust in science

Last week’s solar eclipse generated unprecedented public interest in the skies above us. One reason was that the path of the eclipse fell across a lar(...)

Thomas Kuhn, who argued that science progresses as incremental advances most of the time; however, these periods of ‘normal science’ are occasionally interrupted by a revolution or ‘paradigm shift’
Science isn’t swayed by the fashion of the age

Last week, I gave a public lecture at Trinity College Dublin on the emergence of the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe. We got a very good (...)