U.S. historian of science. He graduated in physics from Harvard in 1943. After working on radar countermeasures in Europe during World War II, Kuhn returned to Harvard, where he obtained a Ph.D. in solid-state physics. While a postgraduate student, he was invited by James B. Conant to teach case studies in the history of science. That early experience convinced him that the prevalent view that the science of the past was bad wrong and misguided was mistaken. Scientists tended to think of the history of science as the history of past mistakes; Kuhn realized that the science of the past was not pseudoscience but the knowledge of its time the best that scientists could then do with the information available to them. That realization was a turning point both in his professional life and in the history of science.
Kuhn left Harvard in 1957 to start a history of science program at the University of California at Berkeley. In that same year he published The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought based on his case studies course. This, his first book, marked an important step in thinking about science. Conant, in his foreword, wrote, “I wish to register my conviction that the approach to science presented in this book is the approach needed to enable the scientific tradition to take its place alongside the literary tradition in the culture of the United States. . . . Professor Kuhn’s handling of the subject merits attention, for, unless 1 am much mistaken, he points the way to the road which must be followed if science is to be assimilated into the culture of our times.”