That’s a Re-Write

With two weeks of the National Academy behind the 2010 crew, there’s been a lot of talk about the Writing Assignment. Locke claimed the largest portion of this year’s re-writes with Cicero and Deuteronomy each coming in as a close second. News stories and six word re-presentations took on the challenge of communicating world-making ideas.

And everyone wants to know what you wrote! To kick off what we hope will be a season of sharing here’s my first attempt at writing Thomas Kuhn as a Dr. Seuss styled story for kids. Let me know if you need help getting your work posted….

The Original: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Normal Science

“it [a paradigm] is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.

To see how this can be so, we must recognize how very limited in both scope and precision a paradigm can be at the time of its first appearance. Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number. The success of a paradigm—whether Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of the balance or Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field—is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself…

The existence of the paradigm sets the problem to be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without Pincipia, for example, measurements made with the Atwood machine would have meant nothing at all.

A third class of experiments and observations exhausts, I think, the fact-gathering activities of normal science. It consists of empirical work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to whit it had previously only drawn attention. This class proves to be the most important of all, and its description demands its subdivision. In the more mathematical sciences, some of the experiments aimed at articulation are directed to the determination of physical constraints. Newton’s work, for example, indicated that the force between two unit masses at unit distance would be the same for all types of matter at all positions in the universe. But his own problems could be solved without even estimating the size of this attraction, the universal gravitational constant; and no one else devised apparatus able to determine it for a century after the Principia appeared. Nor was Cavendish’s famous determination in the 1790’s the last. Because of its central position in physical theory, improved values of the gravitational constant have been the object of repeated efforts ever since by a number of outstanding experimentalists. Other examples of the same sort of continuing work would include determinations of the astronomical unit, Avogadro’s number, Joule’s coefficient, the electronic charge, and so on. Few of these elaborate efforts would have been conceived and none would have been carried out without a paradigm theory to define the problem and to guarantee the existence of a stable solution.”

Kuhn, Thomas S. “The Nature of Normal Science.” The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

I first attempted to infuse the text with the political through elaboration. I had no intention of using the mode of a genre shift but it all made sense after working on the elaboration. Then I had to find a third mode that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time because I nearly ran away with the People of Penelope!

Re-Write #2: Genre Shift

Once upon a time in a small faraway place there lived the People of Penelope. The men, women, and children of Penelope did all the normal things that men, women and children do like laugh and sing and work and play, but all of this was done in a very special way. These laughing and playing people of Penelope believed that walking on their hands was the only way, so they wore boots on their fingers and caps on their toes! This all came to be when Penelope first began and its people had tiny little feet. As silly as it may be, living with tiny little feet proved to be no small feat for it took 837 steps to get from the bedroom to the bathroom and walking to school could take all week.  Now the persistent people of Penelope continued to plod along but they couldn’t help but notice that they got very little else done.

Horses, cars and even St. Bernard’s couldn’t provide relief. The tiny feet didn’t fit the stirrups or reach the pedals, and the poor dog barely escaped. A few children at play one day discovered what perhaps could be a brilliant new way. They think they may have seen it on T.V. or maybe it came to them in a dream, but walking on their hands got them to school with time to play. People watched with interest and fantasized about possibly cutting the trip to the refrigerator from 795 steps on tiny little feet to 5 simple strides on great big hands. The excitement grew and people wondered what other great things they might now accomplish and if this could really work.

With this promise in mind, an engineer designed a car that one could steer with tiny little feet while working the pedals with great big hands and looking out to the road from under the dash. Traffic coordinators decided they could move traffic lights to the fire hydrants so they could be seen this way, and Penelope grew more and more productive! There were great new plans to make walking on your hands the very best way from here to there and everywhere. A few older folks, however, were most unimpressed. You see they had never walked on their hands or even stood on their heads. They didn’t think they would be able to keep up and they were certain they wouldn’t like living in the world upside-down. The local gym saw a need and started classes to instruct the people on the proper form and strategies for speed and stability while all the local posters and signs were re-designed. They even decided to hang trees where the traffic signals used to be! Slowly the world upside-down began to look like the world upside-right as though this is the way it was always meant to be.

So now in the land of Penelope people laugh while they “talk with their feet” and sing when they feel “light on their hands.” Every now and then someone will insist that a world upside-down is simply bizarre, but the people of Penelope are quick to extol how grand life became when they started doing things this way and slow to see any reason to be back on their feet.