Perhaps because they didn’t try to excommunicate the disbelievers. They simply waited for them to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don’t have trouble adopting the new paradigms. When Einstein proposed special relativity, it didn’t take a generation to get accepted. Similarly, it didn’t take very long for the double helix or the triplet code to get accepted by biologists. To be sure, there are exceptions to this trend. One prominent example is Joseph Priestly who despite being responsible for the experiments that discovered oxygen and paved the way for modern chemistry until his dying days continued to defend phlogiston theory. But he’s the exception rather than the rule. Others of the same age as Priestly embraced the chemical revolution.
(Incidentally, this is connected to why I don’t like the common LW tendency to use phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis. In its original forms it worked. Others rejected it precisely because it had been falsified. The vague, convoluted form of phlogiston that is discussed here was the consequence of seeing the theory handed down after already being intertwined with Priestly’s convoluted defenses from the last few years of his life.)
The upshot is that scientists very rarely need to wait for the old ones to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don’t have trouble adopting the new paradigms.
Perhaps because they didn’t try to excommunicate the disbelievers. They simply waited for them to die off.
People really like this idea of old scientists just dying off as a new paradigm comes in. But frequently old people don’t have trouble adopting the new paradigms. When Einstein proposed special relativity, it didn’t take a generation to get accepted. Similarly, it didn’t take very long for the double helix or the triplet code to get accepted by biologists. To be sure, there are exceptions to this trend. One prominent example is Joseph Priestly who despite being responsible for the experiments that discovered oxygen and paved the way for modern chemistry until his dying days continued to defend phlogiston theory. But he’s the exception rather than the rule. Others of the same age as Priestly embraced the chemical revolution.
(Incidentally, this is connected to why I don’t like the common LW tendency to use phlogiston as an example of a bad hypothesis. In its original forms it worked. Others rejected it precisely because it had been falsified. The vague, convoluted form of phlogiston that is discussed here was the consequence of seeing the theory handed down after already being intertwined with Priestly’s convoluted defenses from the last few years of his life.)
The upshot is that scientists very rarely need to wait for the old ones to die off.
My related post on this.