Books on the sciences

There's a corridor between the tower block we live in and the car garage, and in this corridor there's a set of shelves in which people place books they have read and no longer want to keep. I'm often intrigued at the diversity of our neighbours' reading habits. Predictably there is a preponderance of thrillers and mysteries, a steady trickle of books on economics, politics etc, a few travel books, and occasionally some rather heavyweight philosophical literature. Of course some of the books are in French, because that's the first language of ten or a dozen of our neighbours. Today somebody left there a copy of Thomas Kuhn's ground-breaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which looks as if it's been read by the former owner and by nobody else. I snapped it up instantly. It's mine now, perhaps the fourth or fifth copy of this book that I have owned -- somehow, copies of this book, which I used to keep on the shelves of my office at the University of Ottawa, went walkabout more often than almost any other book.It's hardly surprising. It's one of the absolute essentials for all serious scholars of science, whatever branch of science one engages in. Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts has been almost of biblical significance ever since it first came out, in 1962 according to the copyright page of this copy, which is the umpteenth printing of the second, enlarged edition, first published in 1970. I think I would rate this book among the absolutely essential works that all serious students of any of the sciences must read (the others include Claude Bernard on experimental medicine, preferably in a better translation than the one I struggled through, Peter Medawar's Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, and going back a while, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Having said this, I've just looked at Kuhn's footnotes and realized something I only half-remembered from the last time I read his book, that his citations are almost entirely confined to the physical sciences, astronomy and chemistry. I don't think there is a single reference to biological or medical sciences. Perhaps he didn't consider these to be sciences at all. I shall have to settle down and read the book again nearly 40 years after I first read it, to see whether I still consider it to be an essential part of the scientific literary canon.