Nobody dies of being wrong. That is the whole problem.
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Planck is usually quoted as though he were describing how science inherently works.
Science advances one funeral at a time, we say. Old scientists do not change their minds. They die, and a new generation grows up with the new view.
It sounds worldly, cynical, and wise.
In this arc, it is a bug report.
Science is the institution built to prevent exactly that. Its great invention is not that people become immortal, rational, or free of pride. Its great invention is that conjectures can die instead of people. A model can be proposed, criticized, tested, abandoned, replaced, and remembered as a useful failure. The scientist who proposed it can keep living, learning, working, and changing.
That is the Popperian substitution from the Overture, now inside Movement III's selection stack.
Let our conjectures die in our stead.
If science has to wait for funerals, the substitution failed.
A conjecture is supposed to be the cheap thing.
A scientist proposes a model. The field asks what it predicts, what it forbids, what would count against it, and how it relates to what is already known. Experiments, replications, criticism, rival explanations, measurements, and arguments apply pressure. If the conjecture fails, the conjecture is supposed to go.
The person remains.
This is not cruelty toward ideas. It is mercy toward people. A scientific community that can kill bad ideas early does not need to wait for careers to end, institutions to collapse, patients to suffer, bridges to fall, crops to fail, or civilizations to pay the accumulated bill.
That is what makes science one of the great cheap-error machines.
It moves error inward. It lets a sentence, model, prediction, or method take the blow so that a person, discipline, or society does not have to.
Popper is the mechanism because criticism is the selector. The variant being selected is the conjecture. The retaining environment is the disciplined contact with evidence and argument. The winner is not supposed to be the most senior person, the most copied slogan, or the safest career path. The winner is supposed to be the model that survives contact with the world.