It's time to retire that Kuhn/Planck quote Oh, I don't think so. As its presence in Kuhn's book suggests, the kind of 'scientific truth' Planck was talking abo

It's time to retire that Kuhn/Planck quote Oh, I don't think so. As its presence in Kuhn's book suggests, the kind of 'scientific truth' Planck was talking about is not just any hypothesis, but the much larger thing that we now (post-Kuhn) call a paradigm. For a counterexample, you'd need to show a paradigm shift occurring within the individual careers of the most established scientists in a community. QM isn't an example of that, for two reasons: it was the work of a new generation, and the debates you refer to were taking place within the new paradigm [1]. Your example is ironic, since it was Planck who put the Q in QM. If the history of QM refuted the quote as easily as all that, he'd never have said it in the first place. (I do agree with you that most claims of a new paradigm turn out to be false.) [1] That's not quite correct; they also took place before the new paradigm had crystallized—a time when (as Kuhn describes it) old models have broken down and lots of big things are up for grabs. Under such circumstances, minds change more fluidly. But such transitional circumstances are relatively rare and Planck was talking about the normal ones.