Summer Light Reading #1: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

As a currently unemployed/unemployable history of science undergrad with time to kill, I decided to read the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  The book is arguably one of the foundational texts in both the History and Philosophy of Science, a must read for anyone with even vague interests in how science "really" works.  Of course, pretty much everything that needs to be said about the book seems to have been said; as an undergraduate, I won't even attempt to pretend like my opinion on the book's philosophical worth or historical utility matters.  Instead, I want to record my own reactions to the book as an undergrad reading it for the first time.  As someone familiar with the history of science, much of the books central claims barely raised an eyebrow.  For example, I was not shaken by Kuhn's claim that scientists choose new theories based on persuasion and future promise rather than on a careful comparison of that theory to nature or through logical analysis.  Nor did I find it hard to swallow Kuhn's denial that science constantly progresses closer to a single, underlying truth about nature.  I think my reaction reflects the fact that Kuhn's approach has been incorporated, debated, rejected, and reevaluated so thoroughly by historians of science that many historians no longer really see the book as all that revolutionary.  Instead, Kuhn's approach represents merely one of many ways to view the history of science.  Indeed, many historians--take for example the historian of medicine Harold Cook--view Kuhn's approach as outdated, reflecting the skewed values of logical positivism, which elevated theory over experiment and held physics as the model for all of science.  As a history text, Structure is still worth reading, but more as an example of one of many approaches to the history of science.
However, if I put myself in the shoes of a freshman physics major (which I briefly was), the book takes on more meaning.  I think the book speaks to practicing scientists far more effectively than humanists.  Kuhn after all was a physicist; his description of normal science as puzzle solving and his account of how scientific education works are spot on.  Similarly, Kuhn represents a middle-ground between post-modern relativists and the many practicing scientists who seem to have replaced religious truth with scientific truth.  Kuhn does not deny that science seems to "progress" in its ability to solve problems and make predictions, but he convincingly questions whether science really develops towards an end goal.  Science education remains woefully uninterested in these sticky conceptual issues (which is not surprising, according to Kuhn's account of science education).  Structure offers a way to introduce the "big questions" of the history and philosophy of science to science students.  Kuhn writes in a simple, logical way that would speak to scientists in a way that works by practicing historians do not.  For these reasons, Structure deserves reading by any practicing scientist or science student.