[pryce]

I am trying to comprehend how someone could simultaneously think:

1. Kuhn could have authored a critique (of any actual substance) of the way scientists regard the field as progressing, compared to the actual historical record on uptake of new theories & contests between competing theories.

2. Kuhn's criticisms become irrelevant or inapplicable because our society has created iphones and lasers.

If (2) is true, Kuhn surely wasn't saying anything of any gravity and (1) is false. Conversely, If (1) is true, (2) is hard to swallow.

[gboudrias]

It's become irrelevant because technology is now the measure of all things. It's an outdated mindset to view science and the pursuit of knowledge as sacred things that must have an order. If the technology is progressing, then the field is, therefore there is no need to care about the abstract concept of "progress of science", as it is tangential in practice.

I think many comments are missing the point though, people care about Kuhn because of his epistemological innovation and the implications of his work on the very idea of science, not because of its reception by science historians, however great it may have been.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You're confusing invention, innovation, and fundamental research.

An iPhone and an original IBM PC are essentially the same class of device. The iPhone is miniaturised, refined, and improved, but the principles of operation are recognisably similar. They both have similar technological roots.

You can have steady technological process without a revolution in the fundamentals - which was what Kuhn was interested in.

Fundamental research tends to become math before it becomes technology. Maxwell and Heaviside are more fundamental than the transistor amplifier, the dynamic memory cell, or the valve radio, and you don't get to have any of the latter without the former.

After an explosion of change in the late 19th and early 20th century, the pace of that kind of fundamental research has slowed right down. Existing models and techniques are being refined to create smaller and faster devices, but there have been no revolutions that could lead to new kinds of devices.

There are some prospects for invention - like quantum computing - but there doesn't seem to be any immediate likelihood of new insights on the scale of the revolutions created by electromagnetic theory, thermodynamics, evolution, the periodic table, relativity, quantum theory, and the standard model.

[leereeves]

Miniaturization isn't merely building the same design, smaller.

Familiar principles like Ohm's law stop working on small scale devices. Fundamental research in nanoscience was required to learn how things behave on such small scales. Some of that research led to Nobel Prizes and new kinds of devices like MEMS.

But we do seem to have reached a limit in physics; not the end, but the limit of what we can learn with the resources available to us. The revolutions we can look forward to in the near future (e.g better machine learning, implantation of 3D printed organs, safe and effective gene therapy, quantum computers with more qubits) are mostly about new ways of building up rather than learning down. Opportunities for engineers, not scientists.

But then again, a scientific revolution might strike without warning.

[sah2ed]

> It's become irrelevant because technology is now the measure of all things. It's an outdated mindset to view science and the pursuit of knowledge as sacred things that must have an order. If the technology is progressing, then the field is, therefore there is no need to care about the abstract concept of "progress of science", as it is tangential in practice.

You are making a mistake that Kuhn tried to correct in the revised edition of SoSR published in 1969 where his choice of terminology sometimes had 2 senses, causing critics to focus on one sense when he intended the other.

In any case, you seem to use science and technology interchangeably which of course is wrong.

Reading Kuhn forced me to review what we collectively regard as science, engineering and technology. It turns out these are all different things!

From my notes on SoSR + review of Wikipedia articles, I distilled the following summaries as to how they differ:

Science: systematic body of knowledge of the physical world (observations, know-how)

Science can broadly be:

   - applied (urgent solutions) or;
   - theory (non-urgent solutions)

Technology: applied sci. (that yields tools)

Engineering: applied sci. & tech (know-how & tools)

[ThomPete]

Kuhn wasn't talking about progress though, but rather HOW progress happened.

Technological progress is how new paradigms can et expressed. No laser disc without QM, not GPS without Relativity etc. and in some sense that's exactly his point.

The iPhone isn't truth, it's just one way to express our understanding of the scientific paradigms.