What is a paradigm shift?

It’s like believing Santa Claus all your childhood then when you hit a certain age you realize that the source of presents was not the big bearded guy in red. What a waste of milk and cookies!

Paradigm shift is a big surprise that shatters your your previous beliefs and opens up a whole new perspective about reality

Paradigm shift is a fundamental change in what you have previously believed. It is like a big surprise about your existing reality. Life is full of surprises and shifting gears, which may radically change how we view the world. You know what, shift happens in science too!

Some of the “oops shift happened!" moments in science were, for instance, when Copernicus suggested that the Earth was not stationary at the center of the universe. That was actually the common belief at the time until the Copernicus moment. Then they needed to welcome the groundbreaking discovery that the whole cosmos was not rotating around the Earth. Hey humans, we are not at the center of the universe, what an eye-opening surprise! The Copernicus paradigm shift took place in 1514. It’s been only about 500 years that as humans we shifted to a more humble position about our place in the universe. It was a good paradigm shift promoting some humility. Isn't humility nice?

A philosopher called Kuhn came up with a pattern about the emergence of paradigm shifts. First of all, according to him before a paradigm shift, there is always some previous scientific knowledge that makes up the normal science at that point of time. Then some scientists would encounter some anomalies in that normal science, where they fail to find answers to their questions in the existing normal science context. As the anomalies are acknowledged more and more by other scientists, a change in normal science becomes necessary. This transitional phase of change is called a drift, a scientific model drift.

If the scientific community ends up failing to solve the anomalies and handle the drift in the scientific model, a crisis of the model emerges. This crisis is as crucial as an economic crisis, only for the scientists though. After this crisis there are only three options. 1. Anomalies get resolved, normal science wins, 2. Anomalies don’t get resolved, crisis remain as a mystery, 3. (Drum roll) Anomalies get resolved, a new model, in other words a paradigm shift emerges and the crisis ends - everyone is shocked but hopefully happy. Here is how paradigm shifts emerge.

How paradigm shifts emerge? Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions

Quantum physics was a total stunner, a big paradigm shift in the world of science. Quantum physics provided explanations for so many anomalies that the normal science, classical physics, could not explain at the time. For instance light was supposed to be in continuum like a wave, but it turned out that it was made of particles. Shining light through a prism gives us a continuous rainbow colors, but shining light on different atoms showed some anomalies, there were parts where light was not shining through showing discrete properties of energy levels in atoms. The story of quantum physics has started with encountering anomalies in the nature of atoms. Since then, looking at their theoretical and experimental results physicists kept saying, “Hmm that’s weird, oh that’s super weird” and that weirdness still continues to this day… Quantum mechanics is one of the most mind-bending paradigm shifts that humans ever encountered this far.