Thomas Kuhn challenged the positivist ideal that science is an objective means of understanding the world around us. Science, in Kuhn's view, is intrinsically conservative, and reflects the vested interests of established scientists to maintain a status quo, to prevent their ideas from becoming obsolete. Therefore, like anybody, scientists inherit what are seen as "common sense" views of the world (what Alvin Gouldner referred to "domain assumptions"). For Kuhn, scientific belief was made up of socially constructed paradigms, which govern any research that takes place. Scientists, particularly young, unknown ones, are expected to conform to the dominant paradigm. This is why when a child in a school chemistry laboratory finds the boiling point of water to be something other than 100°C, he or she is informed by their teacher that they are wrong. Of course, to anyone living in the current paradigm, the notion that the child might be right seems ridiculous, and their findings are dismissed as bad science. Let us consider some of the dominant paradigms throughout history:
- The Earth is a flat plane.
- The Earth is the object around which the Universe rotates.
- People with black skin colour are genetically less evolved than people with white skin colour.
- People can never leave the Earth.
Therefore, it is conceivable that years from now, people will be chortling at the memory of those noble savages who thought that people could not travel at the speed of light, that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, that water boils at 100°C. Kuhn argues that paradigms are only broken down when anomalies (evidence that contradicts the paradigm) becomes too obvious to overlook. For example, some may have felt they could ignore Galileo Galilei and his telescope, but when someone circumnavigated the globe, people had to take notice. This is a paradigm shift.