Chaos - James Gleick [16]
In Kuhn’s scheme, normal science consists largely of mopping up operations. Experimentalists carry out modified versions of experiments that have been carried out many times before. Theorists add a brick here, reshape a cornice there, in a wall of theory. It could hardly be otherwise. If all scientists had to begin from the beginning, questioning fundamental assumptions, they would be hard pressed to reach the level of technical sophistication necessary to do useful work. In Benjamin Franklin’s time, the handful of scientists trying to understand electricity could choose their own first principles—indeed, had to. One researcher might consider attraction to be the most important electrical effect, thinking of electricity as a sort of “effluvium” emanating from substances. Another might think of electricity as a fluid, conveyed by conducting material. These scientists could speak almost as easily to laymen as to each other, because they had not yet reached a stage where they could take for granted a common, specialized language for the phenomena they were studying. By contrast, a twentieth-century fluid dynamicist could hardly expect to advance knowledge in his field without first adopting a body of terminology and mathematical technique. In return, unconsciously, he would give up much freedom to question the foundations of his science.
Central to Kuhn’s ideas is the vision of normal science as solving problems, the kinds of problems that students learn the first time they open their textbooks. Such problems define an accepted style of achievement that carries most scientists through graduate school, through their thesis work, and through the writing of journal articles that makes up the body of academic careers. “Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition,” Kuhn wrote.
Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has an interdisciplinary character—its central discoveries often come from people straying outside the normal bounds of their specialties. The problems that obsess these theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of inquiry. Thesis proposals are turned down or articles are refused publication. The theorists themselves are not sure whether they would recognize an answer if they saw one. They accept risk to their careers. A few freethinkers working alone, unable to explain where they are heading, afraid even to tell their colleagues what they are doing—that romantic image lies at the heart of Kuhn’s scheme, and it has occurred in real life, time and time again, in the exploration of chaos.
Every scientist who turned to chaos early had a story to tell of discouragement or open hostility. Graduate students were warned that their careers could be jeopardized if they wrote theses in an untested discipline, in which their advisors had no expertise. A particle physicist, hearing about this new mathematics, might begin playing with it on his own, thinking it was a beautiful thing, both beautiful and hard—but would feel that he could never tell his colleagues about it. Older professors felt they were suffering a kind of midlife crisis, gambling on a line of research that many colleagues were likely to misunderstand or resent. But they also felt an intellectual excitement that comes with the truly new. Even outsiders felt it, those who were attuned to it. To Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study, the news of chaos came “like an electric