Normal Science and Puzzle-Solving

Readers familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s work, or anyone who has spent time in a seminar about the history of science, have probably heard of the ideas of “normal science” vs. “paradigm shift”; that is, that science progresses through a steady build-up of normal science, which amounts to incremental improvements on current theory, until a mass of new results builds that is irreconcilable with theory, and there is a great upheaval in scientific understanding and a new paradigm takes hold. Read more about it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Sometimes I have to solve a problem, often as part of data analysis, modeling, or electronic hardware design, that I haven’t been able to find good documentation on. If it seems like a problem other people might have to solve, I’ll post it here under puzzle-solving. If I want to talk about some interesting scientific results, either mine or others’, and maybe not even recent; I’ll post it under normal-science.