Thomas Samuel Kuhn /

Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American physicist and philosopher who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the sociology and philosophy of science. Kuhn has made several notable claims concerning the progress of knowledge: that science undergoes periodic "paradigm shifts" instead of progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that scientists can never divorce their subjective perspective from their work. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well. His best known book is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Thomas Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Samuel L. Kuhn, an industrial engineer, and Minette Stroock Kuhn. He obtained his B.S. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1943, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1946 and 1949,