Max Planck Quotes
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.
Max Planck, 1858-1947, German Nobel Laureate in Physics, 'Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie. Mit einem Bildnis und der von Max von Laue gehaltenen Traueransprache’
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While this is often true, it is another Mises exaggeration using the word “every” in this quotation. Darwin’s theory of evolution was immediately accepted by most other scientists and intellectuals. The opponents then were the religious fundamentalists. The same is true today. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was accepted by most other scientist as soon as they read it and worked out the mathematics. That was before there was any physical or experimental evidence, which did not come till 1919.
Most major new scientific findings are conceptually different from what the current generation of scientists have learned and been used to. It takes some time for reflection and the death of the most recalcitrant scientists. For the new generation of scientists there is no problem. Today, even college students have little trouble thinking in the framework of Einstein’s Relativity, while that was a huge problem for most when Einstein fist published at the beginning of the 20th century.
Much of modern science involves non-intuitive concepts that can rarely if ever be discovered using common sense. It was hard enough for most people to accept the notion of an infinite number, but now we know that there are many infinite numbers and they are all different form one another. Darwinian thinking was contrary to most learned thought of the day, and even much public opinion today. Even Albert Einstein had to struggle to comprehend the findings of Quantum Mechanics which are very non intuitive—one object can be in two different places at the same time. Meanwhile, most people are totally unaware that the world around is does not correspond to normal human intuition and common sense. Yet these are the same and only tools that we continue to use in making decisions about our society. And the fundamental truths of yesterday, the foundation of past thinking and glory, are the naïve simplifications and errors of today and become the superstitions of tomorrow.
This characteristic of science causes the politicians great difficulty when allocating public funds for scientific research. It is often very hard to attribute credit to the right scientist when a scientist herself might not yet realize the great significance of her work. Of a number of different scientists each contributing one step of a process when the person who worked on the last link could not possibly have done it without the others along the way. Who to fund and why is terribly frustrating which is why the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health make most of their funding decisions on the basis of proposals and peer review and decision making. None the less, many politicians are constantly trying to interject their preferences, almost always based on their ignorance, especially when they can get research funds into their district.
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
