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Abbreviations:
CR Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
ET Kuhn, The Essential Tension
SR Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
US Conant, On Understanding Science
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION, Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, to give its complete title, Thomas Kuhn's first book, may be the second best selling book ever written on the history of science. As I write this essay, the Harvard University Press edition is in its nineteenth printing, and that does not include its many years as a Vintage Book. It was also one of Kuhn's first publications in the history of science; previously he had published but six papers, on seventeenth-century chemistry and on the Carnot cycle, five of which were short notes. The book had its origin in lectures for a course at Harvard using a historical approach to teach, not so much science as an understanding of science, to students outside the sciences, that were later rewritten for a more general readership. This history is important to understanding the character of the book, and even the history has a history, which is worth telling.
On 16-18 September of 1936 Harvard University observed its Tercentenary with a very grand commemoration at a very difficult time. It was, as one always says, "the Depths of the Depression," the Tercentenary Fund had not done well, and the alumni, who were counted on for contributions, were mostly of the sort who referred to the guest of honor, the honorary chairman of the United States Harvard Tercentenary Committee, Harvard's most famous alumnus, President Roosevelt ('04), as "that man in the White House" and "a traitor to his class." Few despised Roosevelt more than Harvard's former president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, who feared that he would use the occasion "to make a stump speech" for the November election, and at first refused to preside over the meeting of the alumni at which Roosevelt was to speak. But despite these forebodings, it turned out to be a splendid occasion, featuring a floating concert on the Charles by the university band accompanied by fireworks for a crowd estimated at 350,000 on both sides of the river. Seventy-one papers presented at a conference preceding the festivities, reported at length in newspapers, were followed by no less...