Normal science is a concept originated by Thomas Samuel Kuhn and elaborated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The term refers to the relatively routine work of scientists experimenting within a paradigm, slowly accumulating detail in accord with established broad theory, not actually challenging or attempting to test the underlying assumptions of that theory. Kuhn identified this mode of science as being a form of "puzzle-solving." It is contrasted with extraordinary science.
Carla Helfferich is a science writer at the Institute.
According to Ted Cooney, a member of the Institute of Marine Science faculty at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, this was an exceptionally cold winter on the sound.
Because plants and animals living on or near the shore could have been killed off by the cold, researchers finding a bed of dead mussels may be seeing the results of petroleum poisoning, of chill, or of interaction between the two.
Normalscience "is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like" (5)—scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.
Normalscience "means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice" (10).
Although normalscience is a pursuit not directed to novelties and tending at first to suppress them, it is nonetheless very effective in causing them to arise.
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