I found as relevant the discovery of discreetness of some physical quantities made by Max Plank (who I type as LII, ftr). It was inconceivable up to him that these "continuous" amounts are fundamentally/really/actually quantized. Plank is actually an example of someone who *can* accept/use totally original ideas, which defy anything that is known, otherwise he was very conservative and was accepting facts exclusively. He was actually refusing to acknowledge his own discovery for a long time, because it appeared to him as a very likely human convention.
Ha, but now we have Ludwig Boltzmann, a defender of truth and a great example of ILI, if you ask me. He was the first to suggest that energy may be quantized. Why to me Planck's solution was "Alpha" and Boltzmann's was "Gamma"?
Simply because Boltzmann just made a suggestion like any other, a solution that "works", an appeal to human knowledge that can explain something. To Planck, who was actually a detractor of Boltzmann (basically to him, what Boltzmann was saying was bullshit, not the "real thing", a human construct), it later occurred that quantization is not just a way to formalize the inconsistencies, but an actual, real phenomenon. He is known to have attempted establishing compromises/consensus between the scientists in incompatible matters, suggesting that it's possible to have different technically correct views on the same thing.
Concluding, the difference stands in:
- Boltzmann: "this can be explained by X" - where X is required to exist in human knowledge. His quantization was formal,
mathematical;
- Planck: "this can't be explained but by X" - now X is not required to exist in human knowledge, it may exist or it may be required to discover it. Only his quantization was actually
physical.
(don't confuse physical with "empirical" or mathematical with "logical")