Bohm-Peat-1968-Science-order-and-creativity argue that the attitude of normal-science-as-puzzle-solving can have a negative consequence for scientific progress.
The paradigm provides the scientific community with the standards, methods, and beliefs adopted as norms, and the mind’s tendency to cling to these constitutes what they call the tacit infrastructure of scientific ideas.
This infrastructure is woven into science as a whole and its institutions, visible in:
- Strong institutional pressure on individual scientists not to “rock the boat” (p. 22)
- Scientists avoiding deeper questions by assuming contradictions can be resolved through stable modifications of accepted theory (p. 23)
- A false perception of the radical nature of change — scientists tend to believe “everything changes” in a revolution and “everything stays the same” in normal science, when in reality change is more subtle and continuous (p. 31) (See Bohm-and-Peat-critique-of-Kuhn’s-incommensurability)
Holding onto the basic ways of thinking in a new context that require new, more radical ideas can act as a road block towards scientific discovery and can act as a major source of rigidity.
The Hamilton-Jacobi case (p. 39 - 45) illustrates this. Developed in the 1860s within the Newtonian paradigm where motion was seen in terms of definite paths or trajectories of particles, the HJ theory treated motion as waves rather than particles. Because scientists clung to Newtonian thinking, the theory was treated as a mere mathematical artifact rather than explored on its own terms. Had they followed its metaphorical implications — that a particle is a wave — the essential features of quantum theory could have been discovered in the 19th century.