My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequa… - Philip W. Anderson

My Harvard classmate, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote, some years ago, an influential book about scientific revolutions. Fortunately, many scientific revolutions do not follow his scenario, but the one he focused on, the discovery of quantum mechanics, is well described by his model, which is most valid for a revolution occurring in the central core of a mature science.

It is seen as the application of a systematic “scientific method” involving wearing a white coat and being dull. I feel that too many young people come into science with this view, and that too many fields degenerate into the kind of work which results: automatic crank-turning and data-collecting of the sort which Kuhn calls “normal science” and Rutherford “stamp-collecting”. In fact, the creation of new science is a creative act, literally, and people who are not creative are not very good at it.

“We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse”.