Written ten years before the Summit Series, Structure is one of the most influential books written since the second half of the twentieth century.
What distinguished science in all of its branches, and the law, was that unlike other areas of human knowledge, they were "cumulative disciplines." Newton famously said that if he saw far it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Every lawyer cites to caselaw in support of her argument. The scientific method is to systematically analyze precedent in order to build upon it. Science is an open, not closed, system. Research is shared, advances are spread instantly to others in the field.
But science is only partly the incremental accretion of layer upon layer of advances and voila! one has the theory of relativity--that was Thomas Kuhn's genius. For the vast majority of time scientists practice within a "paradigm" of "normal science." The paradigm is accepted by universal consensus as the end stage. When an "anomaly" occurs, normal science either shoehorns the anomaly in, or ignores it. When an anomaly cannot be absorbed into the existing paradigm or safely ignored, the paradigm is thrown into "crisis." In a scientific crisis the ancien regime incremental accretion of normal science cannot resolve the anomaly. Only a genius can: Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein. The genius overthrows the existing paradigm in a "revolution."
Sport can be science, at least the scientific method can be applied to a sport as it is to the sciences and law. But sport is usually not "practiced" as a science nor subjected to systematic analysis. Sport is usually a closed system. Knowledge is not shared, advances are not borrowed within the sport, much less from other sports.
Canadian hockey was a closed system before 1972. It was "practiced" on a frozen island in True North. Soccer is also pretty impervious to new thinking but soccer has the advantage of being a true world sport where national teams play other national teams and where there are transnational competitions. Except for the Olympics hockey was played at a high level in several frozen locales but each of them an island unto itself.
What happened to Canadian hockey in the Summit Series of 1972 is right out of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It went into crisis.The Canadian hockey paradigm had to change if it was to triumph, and it did.
What so shocked me last night was the realization that revolutionary soccer tiki-taka had first been hockey-taka--and that there was no conscious borrowing. Tic-tac-toe passing was developed in the '50's by Soviet sports "scientists" who took the game apart and analyzed it according to the scientific method. Yet, because sport is not a cumulative discipline, tic-tac-toe passing--tiki-taka--was, from all I know, implemented independently in soccer in Barcelona in 1988.
I have written previously of analogies I see between NBA basketball's positionless revolution and soccer's tiki-taka revolution. And why wouldn't there be? Basketball, hockey, soccer and American football have so much in common from a bird's eye view: all are team sports with five, six, eleven and eleven players per side who have to act in some concert to be successful; all are field sports played on intricately marked surfaces; all have set rules, some more complex than others; there is the "thing," the object, a big round ball, a small disk, another big round ball, a spheroidal ball. You do stuff with the thing, you throw it up, you hit it with sticks, you kick it, you run with it or throw it through the air. The four sports mentioned all have a goal that you try to make with the thing, a hoop high off the ground, a line you try to hit the small disk across, a line you try to kick the big round ball across, a line you try to carry or throw the spheroid across. That is a lot of "structural" similarity, and I would have thought, really, truly I would have, and did thing that all of those similarities would lead to liberal borrowing between the sports. But, it has not, as conclusively demonstrated by the apparent independent revolutions of tic-tac-toe and tiki-taka. Voila! "Oh, you did voila! too? Fancy that." It is really hard for me to believe that soccer minds and hockey minds didn't have mind-melds, but apparently they did not.
