ABSTRACT
I (MS) have long forgotten much of what I learned in high school, though one topic remains vivid and memorable – electrons. Not that electrons were intrinsically more interesting than any other subject, but I was struck by the fact that two teachers of different subjects discussed at length the mysteries, properties, and importance of these invisible objects. So electrons escaped the bin of forgotten memories because of a striking observation – there existed ideas powerful enough to bring communities of people together. But working together is not a self-evident process, as Thomas Kuhn detailed in his influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The communities of scientists are influenced by their traditions, the course of a discipline’s history as well as the accidental fruits of its pursuits. Members of the community can become partial to their models and complacent in challenging the strength of their arguments, and the process of science is far from linear, where the advancements in science are simply an accretion of new facts.
