Lem's Solaris, or, Kuhn before Kuhn

At one point in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, the protagonist goes to a library and examines the avaliable literature on the science of "Solaristics". He finds that the history of that discipline is characterized by a succession of paradigms and research programs that begin with a hopeful earnestness, then become mired in the fundamental inscrutability of the planet Solaris, and are finally discarded in favor new-and-coming approaches that promise a fresh and more fruitful way of looking at things.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination.

(Stanislaw Lem: Solaris)

The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the early colloidomechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the 'apsychic ocean,' a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean. This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data.

(ibid.)

The publication of Lem's novel in 1961 predates that of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a year. Lem was certanly in tune with the zeitgeist, because passages like the ones I quoted above are powerfully reminiscent of Kuhn's conception of the history of science.

Solaris is, among other things, a meditation on the limits of science. The novel presents a worst-case scenario, where any real progress in impossible. Since its object of study is ultimately inscrutable, the history and evolution of "Solaristics" is sufficiently explained in sociological terms. I wonder if string theory has a bad case of "Solaristics".

The english translation of Solaris is based on the french translation from the polish original, so english readers are twice removed from Lem's original words. Strangely appropiate, since one of the themes of the novel is the impossibility of communication.