OK, going back to the Aristotle pages for a second, the odd thing is that Kuhn gives us almost no explicit discussion of pieces actually disassembling and then reassembling into a different whole - which after all is what the Aristotelian example is supposed to illustrate. There's very little explicit comparison between Aristotle and Newton. Kuhn says that while change in position was the exclusive subject of mechanics for Galileo and Newton, it was only a subcategory of motion for Aristotle. He says that motion was a state for Newton but was a change-of-quality or change-of-state for Aristotle. And he tells us that Aristotle's and Newton's "ontological hierarchy of matter and quality" are inversions of each other - this being the only passage where we get any kind of description of the Newtonian physics that took form where the Aristotelian had once been, a description that encompasses all of one sentence. And that's it. Nothing, for instance, about a Newtonian body in motion staying in motion in a straight line until acted on by a force. So Kuhn is expecting us to make the contrast ourselves, the contrast between our own ideas and Aristotle's, between what we know of Newton's and Aristotle's. So I think he's banking on our own pieces pulling apart and then reassembling in Aristotelian patterns as we read.

P22:
i: "the unit cell consists of the two pieces of metal in contact"

According to Kuhn this is a realization that will "suddenly" come to those of us who know "even the most elementary physics" and who recognize a "difficulty" in Volta's drawing. Ha! I had to read this section on the battery about ten times before I had any sense of what was going on.

What's striking here - but what I hadn't even noticed until Mark pointed out Kuhn's use of the actual word "model," above - is that "unit cell" started life as an analogy, and through steady use the term "cell" then came to be a literal part of a "battery." I recall Richard Rorty once mentioning that bottles weren't always said to have necks and that rivers weren't always said to have mouths. Looking at my American Heritage Dictionary, I see that the English "cell" derives from cella, the Latin word for storeroom and chamber, though I don't know if "cella" was the Italian word in Volta's time or, whatever the word, what its standard usage was. Monks lived in cells, right?

ii: "the source of an electrical tension"
iii: "generating a contact potential, which would neutralise the initial effect"

(So does this mean that Volta thinks the liquid is acting as both a connector and an insulator?)

I didn't note much on this page myself, but I should have pounced on "Pursuing Volta's text still further, one realizes that he is assimilating his new discovery to electrostatics." Whatever "electrostatics" means. (Am. Her. "Electrostatic: Of or pertaining to stationary electric charge." "Electrostatics: The physics of electrostatic phenomena.") So presumably, among physicists in Volta's time, there is a coherent set of ideas about electrostatics, and so Volta's conception of the cell ("two pieces of [different] metal in contact") is meant to be compatible with that coherent set. (Hence Volta's discovery would initially have seemed to be "cumulative," as adding to contemporary knowledge rather than overthrowing it, right? I wish Kuhn had spelled this out.)

iv: "The bimetallic jar is a condenser or Leyden jar, but one that charges itself"
v: "The pile of coins is, then, a linked assemblage or "battery" of charged Leyden jars, and this where, by specialisation from the group to its members, the term "battery" comes from in its application to electricity."

So the term "electric battery" began life as a metaphor, too.