Max Planck — "When you change your opinion, you are not a weakling. You are a scientist."
When you change your opinion, you are not a weakling. You are a scientist.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Max Planck
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth kn…"
"The progress of science depends on the freedom of thought."
"Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out."
"The quantum hypothesis is not a hypothesis; it is a fact."
"The ultimate goal of science is to understand the universe and our place in it."
Details
Attributed, often in discussions of scientific method.
Date: Late 19th / Early 20th century
GeneralVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Updating your views when new evidence appears is not a sign of weakness or inconsistency. It is the core discipline of science: letting reality correct your thinking rather than clinging to a position for pride's sake. Changing your mind in response to better data is a mark of intellectual honesty and rigor, not failure. Holding fixed beliefs in the face of contradicting facts is actually the failure mode.
Relevance to Max Planck
Planck personally lived this. He was a classical physicist trained in deterministic Newtonian tradition, yet in 1900 his blackbody radiation work forced him to propose that energy is quantized, a radical break from everything he had been taught. He reluctantly revised his worldview to follow the math, birthing quantum theory. He also famously observed that science advances 'one funeral at a time' because older scientists refuse such revisions.
The era
Planck worked from the late 1800s into the 1940s, an era when physics was being violently overturned. Newtonian certainty gave way to relativity (Einstein, 1905) and quantum mechanics. Many senior physicists resisted, insisting classical mechanics was nearly complete. Meanwhile Planck witnessed Germany's collapse through two world wars, lost a son to Nazi execution, and saw ideology override evidence publicly. Defending open-minded revision of beliefs carried real moral weight in that climate.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].