[bluGill]

The more important lesson for those of us are are "old" is to not get stuck in things that were learned in the past when they are found false.

If you are not yet old, remember this - it is very likely you will old in a few years.

[somenameforme]

It's more nuanced because many things are never really found false, or can't realistically be falsified. Planck was implicitly referencing the whole controversy over quantum mechanics, and how exactly to interpret it. None other than Einstein refused, all the way to his death, to accept a probabilistic interpretation in spite of all evidence pointing in that direction.

He simply believed on a fundamental level that the universe must be deterministic. Many don't understand that many of his famous quotes like 'spooky action at a distance' or 'god doesn't play dice' were mocking probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, like the Copenhagen Model - the one we still assume to this very day.

Of course there even remains the possibility that at some point in the future he may even be proven correct. And at this point I'm playing into the very same mindset that essentially explains where Planck's Principle comes from, but perhaps such being a part of humanity is not an entirely bad thing. It's certainly been with us even as mankind has gone through unprecedented leaps of understanding and technological advancement.

[12_throw_away]

> None other than Einstein refused, all the way to his death, to accept a probabilistic interpretation in spite of all evidence pointing in that direction. [...] Of course there even remains the possibility that at some point in the future he may even be proven correct

To the extent that decoherence is the currently favored interpretation of quantum mechanics, that's basically now. In that picture, god does not play dice with the universe, rather the observers are themselves the dice.

[peterfirefly]

We are all Wigner's friend. That rock over there, those specks of dust here, the wings of all the butterflies, the moons of Titan, and SN 1987A. Everything is just Wigner's friend.