Kuhn - Tentative Answer

 Claire noted that Kuhn “is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation” and I would like to speak on this notion. The constellation metaphor certainly resonates with my perception of modern science. The idea that we accept certain fundamental theories and we focus on building upon these “building blocks” in order to advance the respective discipline has been used to great success. Certainly in a theoretical discipline, in order for one to make progress on a certain problem, one should pursue to exhaust the knowledge of his/hers predecessors (to a certain degree as innovation can be inspired from other sources), before attempting to further the bounds to human knowledge. Such a pursuit leads to a perennial accumulation of knowledge, ultimately resulting in a situation in which a lifetime is laughably insufficient to understand the totality of the material at hand. Thus one can begin taking certain foundational “facts” as true without proof and proceed with research. However, this proves troublesome as understanding the proof of something isn’t solely about the result, it is the methodology of thinking that can be lost through these methods. By eschewing the “history" of a theory, one is never able to obtain the intuition needed to pursue modern problems. This lack of intuition carries over into the lack of insight as to the types of objects one should be considering, further limiting the potential for progress. As a result, mathematicians and theoretical physicists began to specialize in order to be able to understand a larger percentage of knowledge in their area. Furthermore, there was a remarkable effort to generalize and formalize the language that people use to think about these abstract objects. Through generalization, one obtains more powerful statements that have universal characteristics. These generalizations require a different way to look at the same problem, thus there is more to science then adding to the constellation, sometimes it is important to take a step back and look at the stars in a different way.