It's a pattern that's been well documented in the scientific community. You generally get a burst of innovation when enough of an older generation of scientists

It's a pattern that's been well documented in the scientific community. You generally get a burst of innovation when enough of an older generation of scientists dies off for their ossified cognitive habits to stop holding back the more correct of the theories that have arisen in the mean time. (Don't ask me to cite it though. I don't have time to go digging back through the textbooks from my "scientific reasoning" course.)