Science Quote by Max von Laue

Science rarely advances by issuing a press release; it advances by surviving a room full of skeptics. Von Laue’s sentence is doing the quiet work of re-centering that reality. “Notwithstanding” signals he’s already laid out what he considers decisive evidence, yet he refuses the triumphalist shortcut. The phrasing is almost bureaucratically calm, and that’s the point: the understatement becomes a critique of how belief actually moves through institutions.

The key word is “initially.” It smuggles in a timeline of resistance that’s less about logic than about professional inertia. Wave theory (in von Laue’s era, tangled up with debates over light, electrons, and quantum behavior) wasn’t just a new idea; it was a redistribution of authority. Accepting it meant conceding that older intuitions - particle pictures, classical mechanics, even the everyday metaphors scientists used to think with - were insufficient. The subtext is that “major arguments” don’t instantly defeat habits of mind, reputations, or the sunk cost of entire careers.

“Did not meet with complete acceptance” is also a masterclass in scientific diplomacy. He doesn’t name the dissenters, doesn’t sneer, doesn’t dramatize. That restraint reads as strategic: keep the community intact while acknowledging the sociological truth that evidence is necessary but not socially self-executing. In a single measured clause, von Laue frames resistance as a phase, not a refutation - a way of protecting the theory’s eventual legitimacy while admitting how messy the path to consensus always is.