The theories of relativity were revolutionary. Everybody agrees that Einstein brought about this revolution. Even the people that claim that Einstein just tweaked the theories of Lorentz and Poincar, admit that Einstein was the first to recognize the physical meaning of the formulations. He understood that the terms and concepts like those of absolute space and absolute time must lose there meaning and other concepts had to replace them, if we were to be able to understand the phenomena of electrodynamics. All this is consistent with a scientific revolution as conceived of by Kuhn. It is then possible to express the revolution in science that Einstein started in terms of Kuhns paradigms and paradigm shifts.Kuhn thought that scientific development was discontinuous . He believed that the important changes in science show radical discontinuity. Most basic to his views was the concept of a paradigm. A paradigm or as he latter termed it, a disciplinary matrix, was the most fundamental rules and concepts that defined a field of study. He said that a disciplinary matrix has three or four basic parts. The first is the symbolic generalizations. For example, in the Newtonian disciplinary matrix that was the paradigm at the time that Einstein worked, a symbolic generalization would be F = ma. The second part of the disciplinary matrix was what he called the metaphysical parts or the ontology. This is where the entities that a theory is committed to are. These are the things that the disciplinary matrix assumes exist in order to express the phenomena of a field of science in terms of these things. In the Newtonian disciplinary matrix, a metaphysical part would be the mechanical viewpoint: that everything can be expressed by bodies in motion under the influence of Newtons laws of motion. This was the reason that gave rise to the ideas that heat is a molecular phenomena and the kinetic theory of gases. The third part of a disciplinary matrix is th...
