The route of normal science

The scientific community cannot practise science without some set of accepted beliefs that form the foundation on how to practice science. 

Normal science, the everyday work of scientists, is set on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Its success comes...

Normal science is commonly held conclusions. When scientific revolutions occur, they can be invisible and hard to detect, but they are of crucial importance. 

A person will only change their mind about a scientifically held belief from an old paradigm through repeated testing.

Almost every field has certain established beliefs and paradigms. It means that nearly anything could be subject to a crisis.

When a paradigm changes, almost the entire world changes with them. Scientists ask different questions, follow different rules and use different terms.

Scienti...

Many people think that science progresses in a linear fashion, from ignorance to knowledge. If that were true, old ideas would never need to be overturned, only built upon. 

Scientific revolutions happen in a specific pattern:

• Normal science: Adding to existing knowledge through experiments and study.
• Puzzle-solving: Finding and fixing discrepancies in science.
• Paradigm: Th...

Because there is a paradigm doesn’t mean there is a set of rules that accompany it. Historians can generally find the paradigms of a given community, but finding the specific rules that the community followed is more difficult because:

• Scientists may follow the same paradigm yet disagr...

One of the major functions of normal science is to solve anomalies. However, scientists often assure themselves there is a solution within the paradigm, and it must just be found. But this isn’t always the case. 

Crises are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories. Somet...

A paradigm will become messy as people try to expand their existing views outward into new, creative directions. 

A crisis can end if:

• It is resolved within the existing and accepted paradigm.
• The problem is categorically explained but without the technol...