survey with physicists

[gustavolacerda]

Physicists,

Kuhn would say that most of the theorizing you do, whether explaining new phenomena, predicting the result of novel experiments, etc involves reusing tricks from the examples you learned as a student (i.e. exemplars, "puzzle solutions").

Kitcher interprets Kuhn in an unusual way, and has said that ``Science advances our understanding

Comments

[spoonless]

There is definitely a lot of re-using of results, and I think it's because nature is so self-similar. It's amazing how often we run into one problem that is analogous to another we're more familiar with. Occasionally, but rarely, we encounter a problem that's entirely new and that requires new mathematical techniques to deal with (string theory is a good example of that... and one of the reasons the progress on it is going so slowly.)

I think one of the best examples of re-using stuff in physics is the harmonic osscilator (springs, waves, vibrations, etc.). It shows up in every branch of physics again and again. The reason it shows up practically everywhere is because it happens naturally any time when you have a system with negative feedback. Although again, my view is that it's nature that re-uses stuff a lot... if we didn't do the same, then we wouldn't be modelling it correctly.

[spinemasher]

"Re-use" is not the term I would use. For example the advent of the automobile, though no self-propelling personal land transport vehicle had been invented prior to the car, all the pieces were! The wheel was invented far before our recorded history, the internal combustion engine was invented almost half a century prior. Yet the car is completely unique and we call it an innovation. If Kuhn is content calling everything "re-used" then that's fine for him, though I challenge him to invent something