He studied trumpet with the legendary William Vacchiano and played at Carnegie Hall, but his musical career was interrupted by World War II.

Hanson left the life of a Cambridge don to return to the U.S. in 1957, founding the Indiana University Department of History and Philosophy of Science, the first of its kind, and receiving a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

[2] Hanson died in 1967, when his Bearcat crashed in dense fog en route to Ithaca, New York.

His rich, complex life – ranging from Golden Gloves boxing to drawing illustrations for Homer's Iliad; from camping on a Harley-Davidson to testifying before the U.S. Senate; from tough city youth to distinguished scholarship – was cut short at the age of 42, with ten books in progress, including a history of aerodynamic theory.

Hanson was a staunch defender of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which regards questions such as "Where was the particle before I measured its position?"

He was intrigued by paradoxes, and with the related concepts of uncertainty, undecidability/unprovability, and incompleteness; he sought models of cognition that could embrace these elements, rather than simply explain them away.

Hanson was one of the rare thinkers in the tradition of Whewell – a man he much admired – who could really benefit from and yield benefits for both the history and philosophy of science.Hanson's 1958 work Patterns of Discovery was followed by Thomas Kuhn in Kuhn's 1962 landmark, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that challenged prevailing conceptions of science's development, conceptions that ranged from the strictures of logical empiricism to naive presumptions of objective scientific realism.

Hanson criticized Kuhn's paradigm shift model because it was conceptually circular and thus impossible to disprove.