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by waserwill 2823 days ago
First, note that you are conflating Kuhn's talk of theories with talk of disciplines. The introduction of quantum mechanics enhanced the explanatory power of physics; it also sent alternative theories, which proposed too many factors or more poorly explained the world, to the dustbin.

On that note, can physics be called a "mature science," then? To reconcile relativistic and quantum physics—both of which provide limited but very accurate and useful results—would be a paradigm shift; it would require the revision of large parts of one or both theories to be able to combine them without contradiction.

There are core ideas in each of these theories which are not simply revisable: they are connected with too many others. Peripheral ideas are malleable; the precise number of genes isn't very important if we can still explain protein variety (via alternative splicing and other modifications).