From the opening chapter of Thomas Kuhn’s 1957 book, The Copernican Revolution, about the biggest game-changer in science history:

“Even its consequences for science do not exhaust the Revolution’s meanings. Copernicus lived and worked during a period when rapid changes in political, economic, and intellectual life were preparing the bases of modern European and American civilization. His planetary theory and his associated conception of a sun-centered universe were instrumental in the transition from medieval to modern Western society, because they seemed to affect man’s relation to the universe and to God. Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory, which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind. Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of an infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal center of God’s creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of a transition in Western Man’s sense of values.”

•••••••••

Explaining Kuhn’s “Paradigm Shift”:

“All I’m offering is the truth”: