"The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life."
— Arthur Koestler
The Progress Of Science Is Strewn
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
About this quote
From The Ghost in the Machine (1967), where Koestler examines the history of science as a series of revolutionary paradigm shifts rather than smooth accumulation. Each generation's confident theories are eventually exposed as partial or mistaken, yet while they hold sway they are treated as eternal truths. The image of bleached skeletons in the desert is a deliberately humbling reminder that the scientific certainties of today may be tomorrow's abandoned frameworks — a point developed in parallel by the philosopher of science Karl Popper, whose work Koestler admired.
Source
The Ghost in the Machine, 1967