"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"
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Progress, Planck suggests, is less a courtroom victory than a demographic event. The line lands with a scientist’s deadpan brutality: don’t expect evidence to melt resistance; expect time to bury it. It’s funny in the way a lab report can be funny - clinically, almost cruelly - because it refuses the comforting story that better arguments win. Instead, it points to the stickier truth about institutions: reputations, careers, and identities get welded to old frameworks, and people defend those frameworks with the ferocity of self-preservation.
The intent isn’t nihilism about science; it’s a diagnostic about scientists. Planck is describing the sociology around the data: peer review, gatekeeping, and the professional risk of betting against what your mentors taught you. “Making them see the light” is a wink at Enlightenment mythology, the fantasy that rationality is an on-switch. His alternative mechanism - generational turnover - is both cynical and oddly hopeful. If minds don’t reliably change, cultures can. A “new generation” doesn’t have to perform the ego-wounding act of admitting they were wrong; they simply start from the updated baseline.
Context matters: Planck lived through the upheavals of early 20th-century physics, when quantum theory didn’t just add a fact or two but threatened the classical picture that had organized everything from pedagogy to prestige. The subtext is an indictment of scientific conservatism as much as a celebration of scientific self-correction: truth advances, but not because people are especially virtuous - because the community eventually refreshes its defaults.
The intent isn’t nihilism about science; it’s a diagnostic about scientists. Planck is describing the sociology around the data: peer review, gatekeeping, and the professional risk of betting against what your mentors taught you. “Making them see the light” is a wink at Enlightenment mythology, the fantasy that rationality is an on-switch. His alternative mechanism - generational turnover - is both cynical and oddly hopeful. If minds don’t reliably change, cultures can. A “new generation” doesn’t have to perform the ego-wounding act of admitting they were wrong; they simply start from the updated baseline.
Context matters: Planck lived through the upheavals of early 20th-century physics, when quantum theory didn’t just add a fact or two but threatened the classical picture that had organized everything from pedagogy to prestige. The subtext is an indictment of scientific conservatism as much as a celebration of scientific self-correction: truth advances, but not because people are especially virtuous - because the community eventually refreshes its defaults.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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