Historian Of Science

🇺🇸Thomas Kuhn

Philosophy

Western philosophy

1922–1996

"Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion."

Joseph Priestley

Science

1733–1804

"From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices."

"Nicolaus Copernicus is the supreme example of a man who revolutionized science by looking at the old facts in a new way."

🇺🇸Michael Shermer

Business

scientific skepticism

b. 1954

"The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not."

Abraham Pais

Science

1918–2000

"Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?"

🇺🇸James Gleick

Literature

b. 1954

"James Gleick's website with selections of his work."

"Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students"

"The belief in creation as the background of empiricomathematical science–that seems strange. Yet the ways of thought, human thought, in its search for truth are, indeed, very strange."

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis

Science

1892–1965

"Modern science was born in the period beginning with Copernicus's work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and ending with Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Philosophiae Mathematica."