Planck's Principle
The view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but that successive generations of scientists have different views.
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Origin
Max Planck recorded the observation near the end of his life; it appeared posthumously in his Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie (Leipzig, 1948), translated as Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949). His original wording was measured: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents…but rather because its opponents eventually die." The catchy "funeral by funeral" paraphrase was popularised by economist Paul Samuelson in a 1975 Newsweek column, and the term "Planck's Principle" entered the sociology of science in a 1978 article in Science.
Updated May 30, 2018