Has college dropout done the impossible and created a perpetual motion machine?

Or, much more likely, we'd heat the Earth up enough that we could successfully radiate the excess energy out into space. Al Gore would not like that plan one bit.

Of course, while you're violating the second law of thermodynamics, I suppose you could always build a second machine that takes the exhaust heat from your perpetual-motion-powered cars and planes and sends it back to wherever it came from.

"The preceding pages have carried my schematic description of scientific development as far as it can go in this essay. Nevertheless, they cannot quite provide a conclusion. If this description has at all caught the essential structure of a science's continuing evolution, it will simultaneously have posed a special problem: Why should the enterprise sketched above move steadily ahead in ways that, say, art, political theory, or philosophy does not? Why is progress a perquisite reserved almost exclusively for activities we call science? The most usual answers to that question have been denied in the body of this essay. We must conclude it by asking what substitutes can be found."

Page 162:

"Viewed from within any single community, however, whether of scientists or of non-scientists, the result of successful creative work is progress."

163:

"These doubts about progress arise, however, in the sciences too. Throughout the pre-paradigm period when there is a multiplicity of competing schools, evidence of progress, except within schools, is very hard to find."

"part of the answer to the problem of progress lies simply in the eye of the beholder."

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He also manages to compare scientists to characters form 1984, and claim that we choose which fields to call science based on which ones appear to make progress, so science seems to achieve progress in part through a selection effect.

So, he takes it for granted that we don't make progress in a variety of fields. He attacks scientific progress as subjective -- a matter of biased points of view. He has doubts about progress in general which extend to science. Part of the answer, he says, is that science doesn't actually make progress. And, he says, the last 12 chapters denied the common sense views on why and how science makes progress, and he hopes to come up with a substitute, but he isn't even trying very hard (because he doesn't really believe in progress very much, in general).

OK, I read some Kuhn for you. shudder. Someone go read Fabric of Reality now :) It is full of good explanations.

Phrased another way, I don't think his point in saying how science progresses by funerals is to point to his own death. It was to highlight the misconception that most people have that current science theories come to prominence in science because the revolutionaries changed the minds of the old guard through proofs and experimentation. Rather, proof and experimentation changed the minds of young revolutionaries, and only when old guards die off, the revolutionaries rise to take their place and make prominent the new theory.