>> Kuhn describes what that is. "Yet one standard
product of the scientific enterprise is missing (from normal science,
DH).
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when
successful, finds none.">>
When I read Kuhn, and it has been a few years ago, I was disturbed
by that part. I think, and Kuhn is much more learned than I on this
matter, that I
am highly skeptical of it. Not with the overall thrust of his thesis, but
certainly with the above. Let me give you a personal example (fairly
trivial).
In some work I did many decades ago, I was investigating how the
coefficient of restitution behaved as bodies impacted. Everyone "knows"
that e, the coefficient, is invariant with the speed of impact; a few
people "know" that it rises to unity at very slow (1 cm/second and below)
impact speeds.
My work started out as an investigation of the shape of the "e curve" as
impact speed varied, and how that curve differed with different
materials, As the experiments progressed, I found a "novel fact." The
curve of e vs impact speed DID NOT rise monotonically as impact speed
decreased, but, in fact, followed a different pattern. In every case the
e curve started at unity (close to it) at a very slow speed (0.2 cm/sec
or so), decreased as speed increased to about 1 or 2 cm/sec, then
INCREASED again as speed increased to 2 or 3 cm/sec, then decreased again
to a plateau value of a constant e somewhere around 4 cm/sec and above.
Bob -- that was a "novel fact," one I was not looking for; one that
rather completely redirected my experiments. I cannot see where it fits
Kuhn's words above at all. No -- I never did "solve" the problem from a
theoretical viewpoint; I tried, but came up empty and, finally, moved on
to other, more interesting, problems.
BTW, I will concede to you that Kuhn IS right if he rewrote the above as
"sometimes." In writing the above, I remembered that in the literature
search I did after observing the phenomenon, I found a 1919 (or so)
article by Raman, I think in the Journal of Physics. Raman is certainly a
greater physicist than most of us. He had observed the same phenomenon,
using a very different physical setup, published the data points and had
smoothed out the curve, ignoring the anomaly!
You conclude by writing:
>I am trying to discover novelties of fact and theory, that is,
anomalies to
the Darwinian paradigm, because I believe the paradigm is incomplete ...>
I understand, and am in agreement with that approach. It is fully
legitimate IMHO.
Cheers
Burgy
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