SLATE COLUMN: …Early in his career, [German physicist Max ] Planck strongly endorsed the beliefs of other physicists in the late 19th century: We did not need “atoms” to describe matter. But, by age 32, Planck had studied enough of the advances in chemistry to change his mind. He was among the first physicists to say that further progress in science would require embracing the reality of atoms…
In 1905, at the age of 47, Planck was the grand old man of theoretical physics at the world’s leading physics journal, Annalen der Physik. There, he promoted a new paper from the largely unknown Albert Einstein. The great majority of physicists were skeptical of the young man’s radical theory of light, in which the speed of light was constant, but distance and time were eerily flexible. But Planck saw that special relativity was an elegant and exact explanation for all the accumulated data. Without Planck championing Einstein, the young outsider—an eventual close friend also prone to changing his mind—the history of physics and technology might have been very different…
Surprisingly, Planck never requested or expected flexibility from his peers. He famously stated what’s become known as “Planck’s principle”: “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.” In other words, new ideas do not advance by evidence, argument, and persuasion, but rather by older thinkers with older ideas passing away. One wonders if he was being darkly humorous, but in keeping with Prussian stereotypes, he was not a very funny man in general… (more)
EDITOR: Successful political activists recognize that progress depends upon educating the younger generations, not changing the minds of the older. Very sad, but in most cases, true. It takes a lot of patience.
