Peter Baranowski was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied Physics and Arabic in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Oxford before completing the directing program at the University of Television and Film Munich.
After working briefly in the private sector, he directed award-winning shorts like Rauschgift (Locarno winner) and Bis ich es weiß (Toronto). His documentary The Temperature of Will premiered in Munich and was released in German cinemas.
He lived in Central Asia to produce his feature Science and now develops projects at his Munich-based company Rohstoff Film, focusing on the intersection of science and art.

Had GPT existed when I was choosing a profession, I probably would have subscribed immediately. Too many paths seemed rich and promising; I longed to delegate the decision. My willingness to immerse myself in a field was strong, but so was my uncertainty about which field it should be. Could the dilemma be solved by choosing something broad enough to inhabit multiple worlds at once? But what, exactly, could that something be?

Looking back, I try to make sense of why I eventually chose physics. I suspect some version of Stephen Hawking’s claim—that philosophy had given way to physics—played a role. Aligned with the zeitgeist and fueled by sci-fi pop culture, I must have believed that spaceships and telescopes brought us closer to the stars than, say, Dante’s account of Paradise ever could.

At university, however, I began to sense that something was wrong with modern physics. Its approaches to reality were rich, extravagant, sometimes subversive. Yet none of it seemed to translate back into human experience. Today I might shrug—many disciplines don’t. But back then, I was searching for more.

A respected theory in physics claims that when a laser beam passes through a tiny hole, the universe splits into infinitely many offspring universes. True, deep, poetic? Perhaps. Yet even in principle, we can never access any of those universes except the one we inhabit. Such disclaimers shadow most physicists’ accounts of reality’s wilder sides: all the magic happens “only on the quantum level,” “at near-light speed,” or even “before space and time.” What frustrated me was that, by design, these ideas remained sealed off from lived experience.

“We now see through a glass, darkly,” reads a line from a much older source of wisdom, acknowledging humanity’s fraught access to truth. St. Paul promised the Corinthians, “but then we shall see face to face,” pointing toward the afterlife. The scientific project, by contrast, has long sought to relocate that “then” firmly within the living. Yet despite its successes—from science’s emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to today—the problem of access has never disappeared. Perhaps it is here, in the gap, that the true mystery dwells.

Physics sees the world through mathematics. To glimpse it clearly, students must stretch their mental resources to the limit—and beyond. Nobody I met between Heidelberg and Harvard undertook the necessary rewiring unchallenged; many survivors emerged deeply marked. Yet without fluency in math, one cannot hope to join the tribe. In such a context, turning to the history of science might feel like fleeing from hardcore differential equations to dwell comfortably among past errors. And yet it is precisely in the grey zone between history and philosophy that, in 1962, a genuine bombshell shook the scientific community—and brought me a little closer to the stars.

Press UChicago

Thomas S. Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | The University of Chicago Press | 264 pages | 18 USD

Thomas Kuhn, then a young Harvard physicist, published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, questioning everything believed about the workings of science. While most imagined knowledge growing steadily, Kuhn showed that progress happens through stark, irreversible ruptures.

He likened these breaks to a Gestalt switch—the way a drawing can appear first as a duck and then as a rabbit, without lines shifting. Once the switch occurs, the old figure slips out of reach. Scientific history offers many such moments. For centuries, Ptolemy’s cosmos placed Earth at the center, with the sun and moon counted as planets. Copernicus drew no new stars, yet Earth became a planet circling the sun. The sky had not changed, but the world had. Similarly, fire, once seen as phlogiston escaping from matter, became oxygen binding to it under Lavoisier. Flames looked the same but burned in a new reality.

That, for Kuhn, is the essence of a paradigm shift: not slow accumulation of facts, but a sudden reconfiguration of vision, when the same evidence belongs to another world. With it, all bridges are burned: a paradigm shift gives birth to a new word, a new language, even a new meaning of science. Practitioners either learn the new tongue or fade as professionals. Kuhn showed that no neutral language exists (maybe even in principle) through which paradigms might converse. While the examples were well known before Kuhn, it is the extent to which he drives the implications that makes his work revolutionary. And its central concept of a “paradigm shift” entered everyday language.

While reading, a pressing question arose: why had I not encountered earlier what is often called one of the 20th century’s most important contributions to understanding science?

I like to imagine the answer is more intriguing than mere oversight. What if science itself were conspiring against me, concealing how paradigm shifts unsettle its foundations? As Kuhn describes, students are carefully initiated into the reigning paradigms until they absorb them as the unquestioned “normal way” of doing science. Daily work then appears less like grand discovery and more like puzzle-solving—fitting pieces together according to the paradigm’s rules. Entire generations may spend their careers within what Kuhn bluntly calls “normal science.”

Yet while many assume this picture represents nature itself, Kuhn insists it does so only within the paradigm’s limits. Over time, cracks appear: phenomena accumulate that resist explanation with available tools. The paradigm enters crisis until a new framework is forged. Such revolutions rarely come from established masters; more often they arrive from newcomers, not yet invested in “the way things are done.” Conversion is uneven: the old guard resists, and a new paradigm often prevails only once its predecessors have passed. By the next generation, the new order is absorbed so fully that its provisional nature disappears.

For most scientists, such moments never arrive; careers unfold within stable “normal science.” But at the margins—during crises—the limits of science are exposed. It is there that I feel my fascination rekindled. At the edges lies an invitation to dream differently, to grasp reality at its roots. Physics once seemed to promise such privilege, but in practice that promise is consumed by devotion to the “normal way.”

For us contemporaries, a blind spot in Kuhn’s writing almost perfectly confirms his thesis: he speaks of “the scientist” as though women—or anyone outside that pronoun—did not exist. At the time, such usage passed unnoticed; today, it leaps from the page as a telling anachronism. Even Kuhn’s prose has undergone its own paradigm shift: once transparent, now problematic—a reminder that “normal” is always subject to history’s quiet revolutions.

Seen today, it almost feels as if Kuhn shielded himself from such critique by confining paradigms to the natural sciences, where the term has a more precise meaning. He acknowledged its potential elsewhere but kept his focus narrow. Yet while reading Structure, I instinctively tested its insights in other domains. And where else could I turn but the realm where, after laying physics aside, I found an intellectual and spiritual home: cinema.

Does not cinema, too, have paradigms—those tacit frames through which we are trained to see, interpret, and declare works ‘art’ or ‘entertainment’? To what extent is it accident—or necessity—that aesthetics are bound so tightly to ideology and political discourse? And might there not be another way of seeing, less bound by the “normal,” that restores art’s power to unsettle, illuminate, even transfigure?

Anyone who has undergone profound aesthetic experience knows how strange the world can feel afterwards. To see reality through true masters of cinema is not merely to step into new worlds but to transform the everyday. After Yasujiro Ozu, casual talk about family life seems haunted by the Japanese director’s quiet, melancholic tenderness. Sunlight flickering through leafy shadows onto a greenish stream carries me into Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s humid, dreamlike pastorals. And glimpsing life through Terrence Malick’s prayer-like lens is to sense the holy shimmering just beneath the surface of things.

Even non-cinephiles perceive reality through a cinematic lens, tinged by memory and imagination. A trip to the Grand Canyon can summon phantom cowboys; a politician’s maneuver may register as capitulation to “the dark side of the Force.” Beyond such echoes, cinematic fragments inhabit our daydreams—the gestures, moods, and fleeting images that shape how we see the world.

Although artistic progress differs from science, aesthetic discoveries open new worlds like Kuhn’s paradigms. We cannot return to a geocentric cosmos, nor disregard how da Vinci rendered the human form. Certain ways of seeing lie dormant until an authentic voice awakens them. Despite laments about contemporary life, one reason I would never wish to live in the past is the simple unavailability of some of these perspectives. Visiting Eden without Weerasethakul is like possessing the most advanced particle accelerator yet unable to access the Standard Model.

Today even children play with models of the solar system, taking for granted that we circle a burning star. But what a journey it was—and how strangely difficult it remains to imagine the world otherwise. Beyond the obvious astronomical examples, Kuhn’s account of the periodic table struck me as particularly captivating. Consider the immense variety of things—alive and dead, hot and cold, fluid and gaseous, burning or frozen, millions of textures—perceived as elemental building blocks, each numbered 1 to 118.

It is in these flights of imagination that the pleasures of reading Structure become vivid. From the first page, it is clear this is a work of passion, born of a profound desire to plunge into science’s workings—not just a corner, but the whole. That reach elevates the book, giving readers a rare sense of intellectual empowerment, as if hidden wisdom were handed over, making the world richer and understanding deeper. It is not an easy read, but neither impenetrable. Crucially, it is authentic: not a diluted “general audience” version, but a thinker inviting you into the heart of his vision.

Today, physics has lost some of the public glamour it enjoyed when Kuhn began. Breakthroughs continue across sciences, but few enter broader consciousness to compel us to see the world differently. In hindsight, it almost feels as if Kuhn wrote at a local maximum of science’s visibility.

Yet loosened from strict natural science anchoring, Kuhn’s account of seismic change feels more relevant than ever. Is the world truly the same after the internet, smartphones, or large language models? Not just metaphorically, but in all meaningful respects? Does “knowledge” carry a different weight post-GPT? Does “understanding” shift when machines share a mode of reasoning once exclusively human? Like scientific revolutions, these technological transformations do not accumulate step by step; they rupture the world suddenly. And just as Kuhn observed that practitioners who refused the reigning paradigm ceased to be recognized as scientists, so too those who turn away from these technologies risk losing participation in contemporary life.

And yet, to hate AI is like hating the wheel. Though I never thought too highly of computers before, I cannot shake the sense that this revolution may rival—or even exceed—Galileo’s impact. In its wake, many may feel tragically like slow, error-prone machines with finite memory—a quiet humiliation woven into daily life. In such a phase, intellectual activity can appear reduced to the endless remixing of our archives of knowledge and art.

I am not a historian of science, and tracing Kuhn to evaluate modern technology exceeds my competence. My fascination lies elsewhere: in sympathy for a radiant passion to understand on a grand scale, to resist modern “normal ways” of fragmenting knowledge. This ambition to think expansively, to create coherent systems, is what I associate with later 20th-century American intellectual culture—next to Kuhn, think Jared Diamond, Douglas Hofstadter, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, and others. Each work bears marks of ecstatic intellectual empowerment, glimpses behind complexity’s veil—unlocking profound insights even as they confront the boundaries of our understanding.

Yes, our paradigms may forever shape and restrict what we can see, blocking access to absolutes. Yet, in probing the vast territory of our limitations, Kuhn opened new worlds. He reminds us that no paradigm can be the last word on our journey of discovery, and he does so with great passion, curiosity, and integrity. Perhaps it is precisely this possibility of radical self-reflection that makes me believe we will also emerge from the current AI estrangement with a deeper understanding—and love—of who we truly are.

When choosing a profession, I feared the constraints of any single field. Yet perhaps it is precisely within our limitations that the most important things become visible—and the possibility of transcendence arises. And this is nothing we can ever delegate.

Yes, we only ever see through paradigms. Brightly.

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