Planck's principle
In sociology of scientific knowledge, Planck's principle is the view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but rather that successive generations of scientists have different views.
This was formulated by Max Planck:
Informally, this is often paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
Planck's quote has been used by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and others to argue that scientific revolutions are non-rational, rather than spreading through "mere force of truth and fact". It has been described as Darwinian rather than Lamarckian conceptual evolution.
Whether age influences the readiness to accept new ideas has been empirically criticised. In the case of acceptance of evolution in the years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, age was a minor factor. On a more specialized scale, it also was a weak factor in accepting cliometrics. A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists.
