The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

That science’s success is explained by a kind of intellectual confinement—that is the single most astonishing thesis in Kuhn’s celebrated book. It is easy to see how the characteristic intellectual demeanor of the Popperian scientist—unbounded imaginer, unrelenting refuter—might sustain the extraordinary productivity of the knowledge machine. But Kuhn’s scientists? How could their inability to contemplate or even comprehend new ideas possibly drive discovery? Science is boring. Science is frustrating. Or at least, that is true 99 percent of the time. Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications. Behind these achievements, however—as every working scientist knows—are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data.