“Ever since prehistoric antiquity one field of study after another has crossed the divide between what the historian might call its prehistory as a science and its history proper. These transitions to maturity have seldom been so sudden or so unequivocal as my necessarily schematic discussion may have implied. But neither have they been historically gradual, coextensive, that is to say, with the entire development of the fields within which they occurred.”

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), II. The Route to Normal Science, p. 22 (2012 ed.)

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Thomas Kuhn 27
American historian, physicist and philosopher 1922–1996

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