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When pressed, Jane will not admit that she is obsessed with Princeton’s former M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science, Thomas Kuhn, author of the seminal work Structure of Scientific Revolutions. She will only admit publicly that she thinks, were the circumstances different, they would have been friendly. Thomas Kuhn is dead. He was 84 when he died. Jane is 16 and alive right now. She is bright and in-the-know, and laments that Thomas Kuhn couldn’t have ever kissed her neck and made babies with her. Here’s how she sees he saw it: there’s the normal: “Have you discovered you’re a lesbian?” says Mark Fisher, the shithead who plays wide receiver and got caught getting a blowjob from Gillian Harris in the weight room; and the extraordinary: “Well, clearly you’ve proven that discovery doesn’t require seeing,” says Jane in response, quoting Thomas Kuhn, because Thomas Kuhn helps Jane be extraordinary. And though she’s not exactly sure what makes a lesbian yet, she’s sure that she is a revolution. These are the things that are enough for her: there was Thomas Kuhn, from Cincinnati, Ohio, near enough where she’s from, and there is their revolution. When Mr. Cringin, her science teacher, says that she’s wrong to think that there’s “magic in the appendix” where creativity “gurgles towards defecation and discovery,” she announces to the class, “Thomas Kuhn said that out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded.” And though Mr. Cringin points out that the frog they are dissecting never had an appendix, he has a bachelor’s degree in sociology and is a long-term sub, and is too nervous to give her anything but a C for the assignment. In her lab report, Jane wrote that, “Thomas Kuhn said what we see depends upon not only what we look at, but what we have been taught to see.”
Jane has decided that, like Thomas Kuhn, she is against accretion. She would ignore it when she saw it. Thomas Kuhn was married twice. She could ignore this. The accretion of wives. See, Thomas Kuhn was waiting for her, not waiting for her like Gillian Harris in the hallway, who would accrete fake tits years after bullying Jane between classes or when she got a restroom pass; Gillian, always waiting, with her plague of threats to Jane made in poor syntax. See, Thomas Kuhn was waiting for her different.
Jane knows this, because she has decided there will be nothing cumulative about her and she knows Thomas Kuhn would approve. For a year she carried in her wallet a picture of Thomas Kuhn. It was only on accident that she realized it was a picture of Wittgenstein. He looked like he could show Will Smith the simple solution to the threat of alien attack using a soda can, she thought, until she saw a picture of him that was him. Thomas Kuhn looked like someone’s father from the next town over. A crooked bottom front tooth, thinning hair, apparently born with bifocals, thick chops, square chin, split lip, creases in his forehead she could fit her tongue into, a nose big enough to tickle that place she had recently discovered the right way. “Thomas Kuhn was so right,” she would think dreamily in the bathroom at school where she ate lunch: The people who disagree with you will eventually die.
Jane was defiant like she thought Thomas Kuhn would want her to be. “Ordering chicken tenders with chocolate chip pancakes could be seen as a paradigm shift,” Jane pronounced the hard “g” to give paradigm its extra syllable when she told the waitress at Perkins who grimaced. It is Thomas Kuhn’s notion of faith in the individual that helps her rise above boys who put their tongues between their index and middle fingers as they pass by. They will die, Jane thought. They were problems, but as Thomas Kuhn himself said, “who wants to go back and unsolve a problem.” She laughed at them, and told them that they were proof that “evolution moves towards no goal.”
At the dinner table on a Tuesday her parents ask her how school’s going. “I will not be subsumed into the normal,” Jane says, “I’m paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn.” Her little brother picks his nose and announces shortly after Jane’s statement was met with silence that his booger looks like the piece of ginger stuck between his teeth. And in that moment, Jane realizes her brother is the anomaly that would never become expected; he is what she thinks Thomas Kuhn wants. He is just a little boy saying little boy things, but she doesn’t know this then, and feels bitterly that her brother lives in a world out of joint, and that this revile she feels proves she lives in an inflexible theatre, where she plays the part like everyone else like her does. In retrospect, she realized that even her brother finding to-this-point unidentifiable shapes in his shit that he named “Tri-rectal” was more like Galileo than she would ever be.
And when she went to school on Wednesday, and Ryan McNamara called her “Rhymes with Depressed Has Been” and asked if she thought she’d always be a virgin, she put her head down. She learned to laugh when Mr. Cringin said “Uranus,” instead of announcing in a febrile diatribe that Herschel’s discovery of the planet exploded notions of the universe, and spent her days hoping nature would change her in the same way it did everything else.