A new scientific truth prevails not by convincing its opponents but by outliving them.
Planck wrote it in his scientific autobiography. Its empirical test came in 2019: Azoulay and colleagues found that after a star scientist's death, publications by outsiders in that field rose measurably.
In practice
- A journal that would not publish a method while one editor sat on the board publishes four papers using it in the year after he steps down.
- A department's methodological orthodoxy shifts within eighteen months of one retirement, having been immovable for a decade.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- Paradoxes in the data, and sayings about knowing