Growth of Science.
It seems to me that the methodologies of the physical, the biological, and the social sciences should be in the increasing order of "richness." . . . It should most certainly not be completely stripped of speculative imagination, contrary to what some physicists thought in the 1890's, when they proclaimed that the only remaining problems of physics were those of measuring constants to the next decimal place of precision. There are, nevertheless, rather long periods of quiescence in the physical sciences, the periods between the "scientific revolutions," as Thomas Kuhn called the conceptual upheavals that introduced new frameworks of thought. . . . The development in these periods can well be confined to refinements in experiemental and deductive techniques. (D, p. 186)
This page was last updated on July 29, 1996, by
Dr. Umpleby.