[Doctor Stochastic]

Scientific revolutions are always resisted. As Kuhn makes clear. And they don't happen over night.

But Kuhn was mostly wrong. Quantum Mechanics was accepted almost universally within a year of Heisenberg's ans Schroedinger's papers.

[js1138]

No fair. Creationists haven't figured out QM yet and probably never will.

I happened to take college geology a few years before plate techtonics was proposed. I distinctly recall hearing rather long and detailed lectures on the evidence for continental drift. It was even in the textbooks.

No one was really opposed to the idea. They simply hadn't settled on a mechanism supported by evidence.

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

But Kuhn was mostly wrong. Quantum Mechanics was accepted almost universally within a year of Heisenberg's ans Schroedinger's papers.

With a name like Stochastic who am I to argue.

I do remember from my physic text that Einstein was a difficult sell. But Richard Feynman was the man who put Quantum physics over the top.

Kuhn was mostly right however. IMO.

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

But Kuhn was mostly wrong. Quantum Mechanics was accepted almost universally within a year of Heisenberg's ans Schroedinger's papers.,

I haven't read Kuhn in decades, so I'm going on memory. But I don't recall a lot of discussion on quantum theory. I could be wrong.

That said, I thought about the fact of quantum theory being excepted relatively quickly and how it relates to Kuhn's thesis. Kuhn stressed the "priority of the paradigm". He cited as an example the over throw of the geocentric paradigm by Kepler and Galileo's heliocentric paradigm as an example.

But an essential part of his thesis was that a new paradigm would not be established until a superior one was well vetted and excepted. Excepted mainly by the younger scientists who don't have a vested interest in the old paradigm.

Most anyone who has spent a career in engineering and/or science can vouch for this as a fact of human nature. How does the saying go? "You can't teach and old dog new tricks".

As far as quantum theory goes it never replaced existing paradigms. It was a new theory of the subatomic world. Just as Einsteins theory of relatively never replaced Newton's laws of motion, quantum never challenged either, except in special circumstances. I see the theory of relativity as an addendum to Newton. We will still us Newtonian mechanics to get us to the moon.

Although quantum theory was and still is a radical break from Newton it's essentially limited to the micro world although it does have macro world applications.

There was never a fundamental replacement issue, although it did give Einstein heart burn. Remember his famous quote: "

..God doesn't play dice with the universe".