ext_6576 ([identity profile] mindstalk.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] james_davis_nicoll 2016-03-03 01:44 am (UTC)

My impression from being a geology major at Caltech in the 1990s, plus further reading, was that plate tectonics was adopted quite quickly. It's a good case of how a "paradigm shifted" *without* people dying off. People resisted the old evidence of continental drift, for lack of a mechanism, then seafloor spreading data came in, and they went and looked harder for a mechanism. (That's probably simplifying work that had been going on in parallel.)

The accelerating universe went from not even being a candidate idea to accepted pretty quickly, with two teams reporting the supporting observations.

I have the impression that quantum mechanics was adopted pretty fast as well, apart from Einstein, but then all the names you hear with it are young, so I dunno.

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