As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his 1970 opus, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, it is helpful to think of science through the lens of the assembly and transformation of paradigms. A paradigm is an over-arching explanatory scaffold, a thought architecture that posits something about why things are the way that they are.
Scientific paradigm (noun): a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated
For those who are at least a little bit schooled in European intellectual history, you likely learned about the transition several hundred years ago from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview. It’s not all that long ago, in real terms, that people thought the earth was the center of the solar system. This map, of a non-Ptolemaic geocentric system by Portuguese cosmographer and cartographer Bartolomeu Velho, is from 1568, about 450 years ago. If humans have been here for two million years, knowing something 450 years ago is like knowing it yesterday. From the perspective of deep-time, we just figured out the Sun was the center of the solar system. How did we figure this out? Anomalies in the geocentric view. Things that it could not explain.
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