Quotes About Paradigm shifts

Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.

Yesterday's truth is today's bullshit. Even yesterday's liberating insight is today's jail of stale explanation.

All great truths begin as blasphemy. Every single revolutionary idea that has ever been visited upon the human experience began as an idea which was rejected.

Capital T truth is dead.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos

People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.

Innovations seem to have a life and a sentience of their own. When conditions are right, a radical new idea—a paradigm shift—may appear simultaneously from many minds at once. Or it may remain secret in the thoughts of one man for years, decades, centuries…until someone else thinks of the same thing.

How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday that are fables to us today?

Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.

Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be 'natural': they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.

El pensamiento científico se nutre de la capacidad de ver las cosas de manera distinta de cómo las veíamos antes

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Spirituality has always been about turning the world on its head.

Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn's language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.

The science of today is a light matter….Those amazing truths that our descendants will discover are even now all around us, staring us in the eyes, so to speak; and yet we do not see them. But it is not enough to say that we do not see them; we do not wish to see them — for as soon as an unexpected and unfamiliar fact appears, we try to fit it into the framework of the commonplaces of accepted knowledge, and are indignant that anyone should dare to experiment further.

Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world.

older theories become more and more unclear when one tries to use them to obtain insight into new domains.

Science, according to Kuhn, has not actually followed the classic myth of steady evolution of accumulating theories based on deeper and deeper probing of the evidence. Rather, science has sometimes made huge transitions as one paradigm, which may have stood for centuries, is found to be inadequate and crashes to the ground, to be replaced by another.

It is Boden's third form of creativity that is the more mysterious and elusive, and that is transformational creativity. This describes those rare moments that are complete game changers. Every art form has these gear shifts. Think of Picasso and Cubism, Schoenberg and atonality, Joyce and modernism. They are like phase changes, when water suddenly goes from a liquid to a gas.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas

The most disruptive paradigm shifts often emerge from the fringes, challenging the status quo with new and unconventional ideas.