       The New York Times, June 19, 1996, p. B7.

       Thomas Kuhn, 73; Devised Science Paradigm [Obituary]

    By Lawrence Van Gelder

    Thomas S. Kuhn, whose theory of sclentific revolution
    became a profoundly influential landmark of 20th-century
    intellectual history, died on Monday at his home in
    Cambridge, Mass. He was 73.

    Robert Dilorio, associate director of the news office at
    the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the
    scholar, who held the title of professor emeritus at
    M.I.T., had been ill with cancer in recent years.

    "The Structure of Scientific RevoIutions," was conceived
    while Protessor Kuhn was a graduate student in theoretical
    physics and published as a monograph in the International
    Encyclopedia of Unified Science before the University of
    Chicago Press issued it as a 180-page book in 1962. The
    work punctured the widely held notion that scientific
    change was a strictly rational process.

    Professor's Kuhn's treatise influenced not only scientists
    but also economists, historians, sociologists and
    philosophers, touching off considerable debate. It has sold
    about one million copies in 16 languages and remains
    required reading in many basic courses in the history and
    philosophy of science.

    Dr. Kuhn, a professor of philosophy and history of science
    at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller
    Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the
    author or co-author of five books and scores of articles on
    the philosophy and history of science. But Dr. Kuhn
    remained best known for "The Structure of Scientific
    Revolutions."

    His thesis was that science was not a steady, cumulative
    acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he wrote, it is "a
    series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually
    violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote,
    "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

    Thus, Einstein's theory of relativity could challenge
    Newton's concepts of physics. Lavoisier's discovery of
    oxygen could sweep away earlier ideas about phlogiston, the
    imaginary element believed to cause combustion. Galileo's
    supposed experiments with wood and lead balls dropped from
    the Leaning Tower of Pisa could banish the Aristotelian
    theory that bodies fell at a speed proportional to their
    weight. And Darwin's theory of natural selection could
    overthrow theories of a world governed by design.

    Professor Kuhn argued in the book that the typical
    scientist was not an objective, free thinker and skeptic.
    Rather, he was a somewhat conservative individual who
    accepted what he was taught and appiied his knowledge to
    solving the problems that came before him.

    In so doing, Professor Kuhn maintained, these scientists
    accepted a paradigm, an archetypal solution to a problem,
    like Ptolemy's theory that the Sun revolves around the
    Earth. Generally conservative, scientists would tend to
    solve problems in ways that extended the scope of the
    paradigm.

    In such periods, he maintained, scientists tend to resist
    research that might signal the development of a new
    paradigm, like the work of the astronomer Aristarchus, who
    theorized in the third century B.C. that the planets
    revolve around the Sun. But, Professor Kuhn said,
    situations arose that the paradigm could not account for or
    that contradicted it.

    And then, he said, a revolutionary would appear, a
    Lavoisier or an Einstein, often a young scientist not
    indoctrinated in the accepted theories, and sweep the old
    paradigm away.

    These revolutions, he said, came only after long periods of
    tradition-bound normal science. "Frameworks must be lived
    with and explored before they can be broken," Professor
    Kuhn said.

    The new paradigm cannot build on the one that precedes it,
    he maintained. It can only supplant it. The two, he said,
    were "incommensurable."

    Some critics said Professor Kuhn was arguing that scieace
    was little more than mob rule. He replied, "Look, I think
    that's nonsense, and I'm prepared to argue that."

    The word paradigm appeared so frequently in Professor's
    Kuhn's "Structures" and with so many possible meanings
    prompting debate that he was credited with popularizing the
    word and inspiring a 1974 cartoon in The New Yorker. In.
    it, a woman tells a man: "Dynamite, Mr. Gerston! You're the
    first person I ever heard use 'paradigm' in real life."

    Professor Kuhn traced the origin of his thesis to a moment
    in 1947 when he was working toward a doctorate in physics
    at Harvard. James B. Conant, the chemist who was the
    president of the university, had asked him to teach a class
    in science for undergraduates majoring in the humanities.
    The focus was to be historical case studies.

    Until then, Professor Kuhn said later, "I'd never read an
    old document in science." As he looked through Aristotle's
    "Physics" and realized how astonishingly unlike Newton's
    were its concepts of motion and matter, he concluded that
    Aristotle's physics were not "bad Newton" but simply
    different.

    Professor Kuhn received a doctorate in physics, but not
    long afterward he switched to the history of science
    exploring the mechanisms that lead to scientific change.

    "I sweated blood and blood and blood, and finally I had a
    breakthrough," he said.

    Thomas Samuel Kuhn, the son of Samuel L. Kuhn, an
    industrial engineer, and the former Annette Stroock, was
    born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati.

    In 1943, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a
    bachelor's degree in physics.

    During World War II, he served as a civilian employee at
    Harvard and in Europe with the Office of Scientific
    Research and Development.

    He received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from
    Harvard in 1946 and 1949. From 1948 to 1956, he held
    various posts at Harvard, rising to an assistant
    professorship in general education and the history of
    science.

    He then joined the faculty of the University of California
    at Berkeley, where he was named a professor of history of
    science in 1961. In 1964, he joined the faculty at
    Princeton, where he was the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of
    Philosophy and History of Science until 1979, when he
    joined the faculty of M.I.T.

    Professor Kuhn was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954-55, the
    winner of the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science
    in 1982, and the holder of honorary degrees from many
    institutions, among them the University of Notre Dame,
    Columbia University, the University of Chicago the
    University of Padua and the University of Athens.

    He is survived by his wife, Jehane and three children,
    Sarah Kuhn of Framingham, Mass., Elizabeth Kuhn of Los
    Angeles and Nathaniel Kuhn of Arlington, Mass.