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MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

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    Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

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  • Presentation
  • Mar 3, 2021
  • 01:16:51

Structural Changes in Systems of Knowledge: the Case of the Relativity Revolution

  • Jürgen Renn
  • Dept. I

 

What are scientific revolutions and how are they accomplished? Jürgen Renn's talk at the DESY Physics Colloquium focuses on the long history of general relativity in the twentieth century as a case study and argues that scientific revolutions are not sudden paradigm shifts but protracted processes that may stretch over several generations. Older theories are not simply discarded but serve, in the course of their elaboration, as scaffolding for the emergence of a new system of knowledge. The talk emphasizes the role of borderline problems between different conceptual systems as triggers driving structural changes of systems of knowledge.

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DESY - Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron

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