I think the example from the history of astronomy the author provides can by turned against him. It was the accumulation of astronomical observations and the refinement of ever and ever exacter measurements that provided the basis for the transition in ther scientific community from the heliocentric to the geocentric system, that took between one and two hundred years, depending when on lets it start (Copernicus or a predecessor) and end (Galileo, Kepler or Newton).
If we look for example at the career of Kepler, we see that he had to accumulate expert knowledge of both systems and that he arrived at his later so-called laws not by a sudden insight, but through tireless work, trying again and again over several years to make sense out of series of measurements that did not really make sense in either the Ptolemaic or Copernican system.
It was not the epicycles that worried the late medieval astronomers, but the fact that according to their geocentric theory the earth was not really exactly in the center of the deferent. Correspondingly, however, the sun was not really at the center of the Copernican system either. Both systems lacked elegance, and both systems were more or less equaly in accordance with the observational data. To solve this debate and to make progress, the strategy of the most famous astronomer of his time, Tycho Brahe, was to collect better measurements. And it were these accumulated measurements that enabled his pupil Kepler to develop a solution. In a sort, he was lucky. Only the data for the planet Mars, which he considered first, was exact enough to match an ellipsis. His data for Jupiter or Saturn would not have allowed him to come up with one.
Accumulated knowledge was not an obstacle, but the basis for Keplers insights. That we might get a different impression is a result of simplifications that happen after a scientific community reaches a conclusion. At that stage such a theory becomes textbook knowledge: a student needs no longer acquire the accumulate knowledge of the previous period, but only the successful doctrine. These doctrines appear and are all too often presented as ingenious insights from geniuses, instead of cumulation points of a collective work of generations of scientists and scholars.
He figured out that the orbit of Mars was oval, and tried to approximate it with an ellipse while continuing to look for its actual shape. It took him a while to realize 'maybe it really IS an ellipse'.
If we look for example at the career of Kepler, we see that he had to accumulate expert knowledge of both systems and that he arrived at his later so-called laws not by a sudden insight, but through tireless work, trying again and again over several years to make sense out of series of measurements that did not really make sense in either the Ptolemaic or Copernican system.
It was not the epicycles that worried the late medieval astronomers, but the fact that according to their geocentric theory the earth was not really exactly in the center of the deferent. Correspondingly, however, the sun was not really at the center of the Copernican system either. Both systems lacked elegance, and both systems were more or less equaly in accordance with the observational data. To solve this debate and to make progress, the strategy of the most famous astronomer of his time, Tycho Brahe, was to collect better measurements. And it were these accumulated measurements that enabled his pupil Kepler to develop a solution. In a sort, he was lucky. Only the data for the planet Mars, which he considered first, was exact enough to match an ellipsis. His data for Jupiter or Saturn would not have allowed him to come up with one.
Accumulated knowledge was not an obstacle, but the basis for Keplers insights. That we might get a different impression is a result of simplifications that happen after a scientific community reaches a conclusion. At that stage such a theory becomes textbook knowledge: a student needs no longer acquire the accumulate knowledge of the previous period, but only the successful doctrine. These doctrines appear and are all too often presented as ingenious insights from geniuses, instead of cumulation points of a collective work of generations of scientists and scholars.